Customer Reviews

Best Hikes With Children in the Catskills & Hudson River Valley

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4 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

The Lewis's have quite a routine: move into an area where there is already a plethora of good guide books, borrow the research and trail information, change it round to suit their niche (hiking with kids), provide no acknowledgement or recognition of their sources, no bibliographic matter, no reference lists, and bingo, an "original" book. This formulaic approach to authorship is in many respects dishonest, infringing, and presumptuous. As for guidebooks in general, there are much better ones around.

This book led me up to Taconic State Park with my family. We followed the very detailed trail directions for a hike labeled as "Easy for Children". The trail was reasonably easy to follow at first, but led us through over a mile of land that was regularly posted as private property / no trespassing. But much worse, at the end, the trail simply disappeared. The book mentions that you may have to bushwhack for 100 feet at the end, but we were up to our waists in thorns, unable to see our destination and at least several hundred YARDS from where we needed to go. Definitely not easy to do when you are carrying a three-year-old. In retrospect, we should have verified the trail with the park rangers who would have told us that no such trail exists on park land. In the future, we will not trust this book.

I've generally had good luck with the hikes described in this book, and have taken my children on several. As with other hiking books I've used, though, 8 years (from the time of publication) can make a big difference in the condition of trails, for better and/or worse. An update might be helpful. We've discovered some really cool places with this book (I like the emphasis on what kids would like about a trail, not just what the adults want to see) and the time and distance estimates are accurate. Nevertheless, I plan to avoid the Taconic Trail mentioned by the previous reviewer . . .

This seems to be a rehash of the other guidebooks I own. The trails have changed considerably since this book was written, too.