Customer Reviews

Hiking Joshua Tree National Park: 38 Day and Overnight Hikes (Regional Hiking Series)

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Joshua Tree is the third most visited national park in California, right behind Yosemite and Death Valley. But don't let that fool you. On any given weekend, a significant portion of those visiting this park are testing their skills on various 5.5-5.9 climbs on the many boulders and cliffs that dot the landscape. If your interests involve the (somewhat) more horizontal sport of hiking, you can find lots of pleasant hikes in Joshua Tree. This book will lead you to 38 of these hikes and is a nice guide for experiencing the parks.

Joshua Tree is mostly a high desert park, so temperatures are more moderate there than many other desert parks in California. Indeed, a dusting of snow is not uncommon in the winter. There are numerous short nature trails in the park, and this book guides you to several of these, most notably the Cholla Cactus Garden. A mere 1/4 mile long, it is more of a short stroll, but if you are lucky enough to be there during the bloom, the flowers put on quite a show. Other hikes in this guide are as long as 15 miles. When travelling on these trails (and overland routes in some cases) the hypsometric maps in this book will prove useful.

On the whole, this is a very nice book. If your intent is solely to visit Joshua Tree National Park, buying it can be a good investment. But if you want to explore more of the California Desert, you would be better served to get the authors' Hiking California's Desert Parks. This book is a chapter of the latter, a much more comprehensive guide to desert hiking in California.

Very helpful guide to hiking in the park. Good trail directions and maps. Somewhat limited in descriptions of what you will see on the hikes but they did a good job and I found the guide very helpful. I would suggest buying their other book: Hiking California's Desert Parks if you are going to go anywhere else as the Joshua Tree hikes are essentially covered in that book.