Customer Reviews

Hiking Mount Hood National Forest

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1 star:		(2)

 

 

If you are interested in learning about the history of Mt. Hood National Forest, then this is a great book. However, if you want a guide to the best hikes, maps, elevation gain, distance, time needed to hike, trip highlights, and landmarks, then you will be sorely disappointed by this book.

It is obvious the author has a great affinity for the forest, but this should be marketed less as a hiking guide and more as an overview of current issues and past events in the forest. Thirty-one hikes are "profiled", but little more than their name, how to get there, a level of difficulty, and amount of use is listed. There is a long discussion about each hike, but each discussion goes off onto a tangent about other issues about things the author saw on each hike. There are some useful nuggets in the discussion, but it is difficult to wade through the "fluff" to get them.

It is a well researched book, but in no way is this a useful hiking guide. Buy Fred Barstad's book of Mt. Hood and Badger Creek Wilderness instead. It isn't as pretty looking as this book, but it will be far more useful.

The previous review of this book hits on an important disclaimer: this is not a traditional hiking guide, with the usual trail maps and route descriptions. A quick flip through the pages makes that point obvious. But there are many such books to be found, and I would point to Doug Lorain's excellent "Afoot & Afield Portland/Vancouver" and William Sullivan's "100 Hikes in Northwest Oregon and Southwest Washington" as the definitive trail guides to the Mount Hood area. Or, you can simply go to the free online guide at PortlandHikers.org for trail descriptions.

Marcia Sinclair's book dares to be different. It's a terrific addition to your hiking library if you count Mount Hood and the vast Clackamas River country among your favored stomping grounds. The production quality of the book is lush, with dozens of color photos, and several fascinating historic images. Each of the featured destinations is described with great attention to what you will see, hear and feel along these trails, instead of a conventional trail log. In this way, the book is a good complement to more traditional guides, which rarely give this depth of interpretive understanding of the forest environs. The author draws from her unique experience as a former Forest Service worker to provide historical and natural history details that are otherwise undocumented for the Mount Hood area.

I would have given this book five stars for it's uniqueness and overall quality, except that Frank Amato Publications allowed for some uneven editing, including several inverted photographs. But don't let these minor oversights prevent you from picking up a copy -- it's an excellent, well-written work that you'll enjoy reading!

This is a very interesting book. I would recommend it to anyone who wants to go into more depth about the natural and cultural history of the region for each hike. It is quite lacking as a stand-alone hiking guide as it doesn't even give the length of the trails, the key points to watch for at junctions, the elevation gain, etc., which is essential knowledge if you are going to rely on a book for your hike. For example, her entry for the Clackmas River Trail hike goes on for 2 pages about the history and sad fate of the Clackamas tribe. This is information I really did want to know, and could never have gotten without doing some research on it. Here it is put beautifully into the context of the trail. She also has excellent photographs of the features seen on each hike so the hikes are better illustrated that any other books covering the region. There are some editing problems, such as the use of the term "ancesters" when she really meant "descendants." I'm not sure why she didn't include some more basic information about each hike. It would have only taken another paragraph or so to give the distance, elevation gain, etc. I recommend this book to those who share my interest in the history of the areas.

An informative hiking guide offers sufficient information including the highlight hikes of the area covered, a detailed direction to the trailhead, a schematic drawing of the trails in the area, and tips for the hike. A topo map and a compass should be the only additional tools when one is on the trail. This book is deficient in all above categories; to make matters worse, there isn't even an index in the back.

Hikes that are regarded as highlights in the Mount Hood National Forest, such as McNeil Point, Barrett's Spur, Cooper's Spur are not even listed as individual hikes in the guide. Trail junctions, recommended turnaround points, end points are not specifically mentioned. For example, Hike 14, Heather Canyon, the author states that "When you get to Heather Canyon, you'll know it." So what's next? Should the reader turn around or keep going? Where are the water sources and potential camp sites for backpackers hiking the Timberline Loop (Hike 11)?

One may decide to pick up this book for its color photographs, but the photos pale in comparison with those seen in Greg Vaughn's Photographing Oregon. For informative hiking instructions on the same locations, William Sullivan's 100 Hikes in Northwest Oregon & Southwest Washington is much more detailed and comprehensive.