Customer Reviews

Lonely Planet Yosemite National Park

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

 

 

A very well assembled collection of recommendations and facts for planning a trip to Yosemite. If you want to get the most of your trip to the region, planning is essential. Just showing up will severely compromise the options you have available. If you are planning to also visit Sequoia/Kings Canyon, you might want to opt for the Frommer's Guide or Lonely Planet's "Hiking In The Sierra Nevada." Personally, I think this guide has a little more detail and better organization than the Moon guide, with the maps being far better.

Planning: The book does a very nice job giving you phone numbers, camp locations, amenities, and tips on which sites will fill up first. This really is the most important, especially if you want to camp at a popular location or want to do overnight hikes in one of the more popular destinations. If you want to stay in one of the valley hotels think a year in adavance (at least), camping in the valley needs reservations 6-8 months in advance.

Trip descriptions: For the places I visited the descriptions were thorough but not overwhelming in detail. The book has both short trips (1-3 days) as well as longer excursions, but many of these can be abbreviated to suit your needs.

Maps: You will certainly need your own big topo map when on the hike, but the maps here (and in other Lonely Planet guides) are among the best you will find in this sort of guide. First they are topographic, which helps you with overall planning, even if you will eventually make use of a big map later on. Second, the maps are in two colors, which facilitates reading immensely. Finally, the printing is fine and crisp. Some other guides have blurry reproductions of USGS maps that look like they were printed onto a paper towel.

Other: The book is compact and lightweight. If you are an obsessive type you could carry it along on your hike without adding too much weight.

Overall, this is a great guide to aid in planning a trip to the region, especially those on their first couple of excursions to the region. For those who want more details on other trips check out Sierra North and Sierra South, as well as books by Mike White, R. J. Secor, and Steve Roper.

I've lived in California for 3 years and have been to Yosemite at least 5 times. We have gone for backpacking trips, car camping trips, and stayed at Curry Village. We always bring this book with us. You need to have a book like this with you when you are there so you can both plan ahead and do things on the fly. It's a great book that highlights all the must-see spots. Yosemite rarely disappoints.. even if some spots are crowded, once you get there, you can understand why! Lonely Planet books in general area always well organized and have great maps. I like how this book had both short hikes as well as some longer overnight backpacking trips. It also does a good job of detailing all the campgrounds. If you want more detail (or a little different perspective) on hikes and backpacking trips, get "Hiking in the Sierra Nevada" by Lonely Planet.

I enjoyed this guide for the easy to find information and easy to read maps. It gave good hike descriptions and the list of spotlighted activites was right on target. I do use this regularly to create my plans for the park. This did lack the personal touch that I found in some other references and found myself picking up other guides to go with the maps in this book. The Moon guide was by far my favorite. But do check it out if your going to Yosemite. More information is always better.

I bought this book and was given a copy of the Moon guide to Yosemite. The Lonely Planet guide has color photos but what I really needed was help in planning a big family and friends camping trip. The Moon guide had a lot of information about different ways to "do" Yosemite, it was more like a guide tha Lonely Planet's book. The outdoor recreation coverage was better too.

I thought this was a pretty well-rounded overview of Yosemite with some nice pics to boot. I've been hiking all over Calif but never quite got around to hitting the Big Y. I had seen pics and knew it was great, but I wasn't quite sure what the best approach to schedule a three-day weekend. Well, this baby helped a lot -- reservations, planning hikes, meals and all that a snap. The maps and spotlight-recommendations were great.

This guide helped a lot with my recent trip to Yosemite. The recommendations were excellent, from good hikes and places to stay, and the reviews of everything were very straightforward and honest. I planned some great hiking days with this book, and found a few good campsites that were new to me. Would recommend it for a trip to the park.

I bought this book for a trip to Sequoia and Kings Canyon and was rather disappointed at the paltry coverage given. Honestly, after having done a 8-day trip in these parks, it felt as if the author(s) of these sections did not personally visit the parks, or even if he/she/they did, they probably just breezed through and/or got information from the Rangers stations instead of actually experiencing the parks for themselves.

Descriptions are brief to the point of inadequacy for many of the sights. Take Hume Lake, for example. If we had just based our decision whether to visit or not on the guidebook, we would have skipped it, because it's two-sentence description stating the obvious: a) it's a lake; b) they have a campground, a shop, phones yadda yadda.

We were glad we made the stop anyway, and it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable parts of our trip. There's a lovely little area called 'Sandy Cove' which the book makes absolutely no mention about, and neither did it point out, that despite rambling off a bunch of amenities, there are no showers at Hume Lake.

I find it disconcerting that the major sites in the parks get a one or two line mention, but the lodges and restaurants in the park get long detailed descriptions. This is a beautiful National Park in the Sierra Nevadas, a showcase of nature's wonders. Surely the focus should NOT be on how awesome a lodge is or how great it is to find a pizza parlor in the National Park. Missing the point much?

Overall, the guide was not a total dud, because the table listing the various campgrounds (Sequoia & Kings Canyon) is useful as a quick reference summary, and the descriptions of places, albeit brief, at least provided an indication of what these sights were: something not available in the free map provided by the Parks.

I can't speak for the section on Yosemite, but the Sequoia and Kings Canyon section is disgraceful if upheld to classic Lonely Planet standards (some of their recent stuff has been unbelievably inadequate, unfortunately).

Would NOT recommend for Kings Canyon & Sequoia.

The write-ups of trails are pretty good, but there wasn't a map of the trail right there with the description, nor was there any way to quickly link one trail to another. Another complaint about this book is that there wasn't a large map showing insets of the trails. I read about Tuolumne Meadows and of Glacier Point and decided that I wanted to visit them. There was a map of each (somewhere in there) but I couldn't tell how far they were from each other, nor tell what part of the park they were in. Turns out they are about four hours / a hundred miles'drive from each other. I used this book in conjunction with the Falcon's Guide to Hiking Yosemite National Park and found they complemented each other well. A E H

I bought this book to use it in Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Park, if you intend to use in these parks I did not recommend. I dont know about the Yosemith (thats why I gave 3 star, I would like to gave two and half), but there is little information about S&KC and lack of maps. The part related to S&KC is just one or two stars.

After arriving in August at our motel in Exeter after midnight, we were glad this book had suggested we ditch the car and take the shuttle ($15) for the 2 hour trip in and out of Sequoia park. As it suggested, this is a fine way to ditch the car and enjoy the scenery and the driver was very informative. Since the book explained that the subsequent free shuttles within the park could take us from one scenic hot spot to another, we were free to catch lunch in the park, go to the appropriate trailhead, leave the crowds, and take an almost private hike from the Giant Forest to Crescent Meadow where we picked up the shuttle and rejoined the crowds at Moro rock. Similar advice helped us navigate the beautiful Yosemite Valley (crowded but gorgeous Mist trail to the top, relatively uncrowded John Muir trail down). A friend had suggested a less crowded, but beautiful trip to Taft Point then to Sentinal Dome, followed by a short drive to crowded Glacier Point, all easy to find using this book. Saved time, stress, and any anxiety about finding the right trails for us.