Customer Reviews

Trail Guide to Cuyahoga Valley National Park

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

 

 

I bought the previous edition of this excellent guide several years ago and have used it a great deal. We live only a few feet from the Cuyahoga Valley National Park, and we take advantage of it frequently. I purchased this guide for my brother, who is an even better hiker than I am. The book has helpful information on each trail in the park, telling the length, elevation, and difficulty as well as interesting characteristics of each one. I highly recommend this guidebook.

I bought a copy of this book for my boyfriend for Christmas and we use it nearly every time we go out hiking. If you are an outdoor enthusiast in Northern Ohio this is a must. Simply put: an essential guide to one of the region's gems.

I'm a volunteer hiker for the NPS, this guide is very helpful on every train in the system, not just the national park, but also the MetroParks that are connected to it. Good directions, excellent information about the trail itself, and helpful in organization.

For many years my explorations of Cuyahoga National Park had pretty much been limited to bicycling the excellent towpath. On the few occasions when I had walked one of the many trails, I found their signage a bit sketchy, and the park maps too crude to be of much help where the signs failed me. This book fills in some of those gaps, plus provides descriptions that motivate one to explore the park, help one to choose which trail to hike, and give some informative historical background on the trails and their surrounding terrain. It could be better, though. The drawn maps are only marginally better than enlargements of the near-useless park map. There usually isn't any explanation of major features of the terrain one encounters, like an abandoned bridge foundation I encountered in the middle of one trail, or an extensive series of clearings I found along another, or a long, double line of closely-planted trees that lined a section of a third trail. On a portion of the Buckeye Trail near Boston, only one of the falls is described, even though a well-traveled offshoot of the trail takes you to a second one that in its own way is just as dramatic. In sum, I have found the book helpful in encouraging me to hike the trails, but some readers will feel that it doesn't give enough for the money.