Customer Reviews

Keystone Canoeing: A Guide to Canoeable Water of Eastern Pennsylvania

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is an essential book for anyone planning to paddle Pennsylvania's rivers. It literally describes EVERY river, stream, or creek in Pennsylvania and gives a nice description and overview of each. In addition there are great maps and descriptions of put-in and take-out points as well as parking areas. He also describes which USGS guages to check for each stream and at what levels the guage needs to be in order to get through without dragging. It is a little money very well spent.

A good guide that covers everything you need to know to canoe or kayak in rivers and streams in Eastern PA. Hundreds of streams and rivers covered.

This book has lots of useful details (length, difficulty, scenic value, etc) about virtually every canoe route in Eastern Pennsylvania, however its drawback is that it doesn't highlight any best picks, so it is hard to decide on a route to try when you are given such an overwhelming number of choices, many of which are seasonally limited.

This book is hard to follow. It seems randomly organized. Trails dot com gave me way better information than this book.

Before purchasing, I was trying to decide between this book and Paddling Pennsylvania by Jeff Mitchell. I have read and used Mitchell's hiking books in the past and have been pleased with them, but when it came down to choosing a good canoeing guide, Gertler's book covers several more streams and rivers and gives much more thorough and in-depth descriptions.

Gertler includes many great maps that label access points, hazards, and road names and numbers. I wish he had included camping areas on his maps, but alas, he did not. His descriptions are thorough and at times humorous, and he includes extra information like nice pieces of scenery to look for and information on water gauges.

What could be considered either a weakness or strength is that Gertler excluded lakes and reservoirs from his book. I do not consider this to be a downside, because lakes are generally calm and flat, and do not pose many hazards like rivers and streams do. Therefore, devoting a lot of text to them is unnecessary. Plus, information about publically accessible lakes is readily available on the web, unlike many of the smaller streams Gertler has in his book.