Customer Reviews

Trail Guide to Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument

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

 

 

As a lover of the region, frequent visitor, and avid hiker and photographer, I own several of the guidebooks for the Grand Staircase. After reading the favorable review of this Trail Guide, I ordered the book from Amazon, without ever actually perusing it in advance. The good things about the book are its compact size and introductory chapter for background information. The written directions to the trailheads are also good, but there are major shortcomings in the book, all of which are frustrating when you are actually out in the field trying to find something the book claims to be guiding you toward. There is no index at all in the back of the book, there are not even the simplest trail maps at all, and the descriptions are severely lacking for some of the trails. For example, the information about the hike to the One Hundred-Hand Panel of pictographs on page 47 simply says, "it is possible to hike up to the pictographs...but be sure not to cross the fence near the trailhead...Once the pictograph panel is found..." Those directions are woefully inadequate in directing somebody to find the panels. At other trails, the descriptions are sketchy and very brief in comparison to what other guidebooks have about the same trail. I would recommend Ron Adkison's "Best Easy Day Hikes" and Steve Allen's "Canyoneering" instead of this one.

The bad news:
-- The few maps are woefully inadequate.
-- In this computer age, there is NO EXCUSE to omit an index.
-- Uninspired and thin writeups.
-- No trail summary, listing in one place a table of all the hikes with length, difficulty, elevation change, ... for each.

The good news:
-- This hiking book won't increase hiker density, meaning increased chance of solitude.
-- It is indeed small and portable.

This is an outstanding guide to the huge region encompassed by the GSENM. On a number of earlier trips I had spent a total of at least three weeks backpacking along the Escalante River and its sidecanyons, but had never visited the Grand Staircase or the Kaiparowits Plateau. I just returned from two weeks backpacking and car camping in the latter two regions.

Urmann's book provided an excellent overview of the region. It was sufficiently detailed so that one could make effective use of it to locate various features, but not so detailed that one could not read through it easily to get an overview. (Of course, for backpacking one should alway use topo maps. No guidebook can be that detailed.)

I first read the about the regions with which I am familiar to "calibrate" the book. I found it remarkably accurate. Throughout I found very few errors (one a misspelling, one a mileage along a road). I recommend it highly as the best book from which to learn what is available to see and do in this enormous region.

I got this, then ultimately ended up getting the Falcon Guide book instead, which had almost all of the same hikes and was better written/thought out. Still, this is a good book, but the Falcon Guide is better.

This book is not only concise but also very descriptive. The trails are described very well, as well as driving directions on how to get to them, and you are told what you can expect to see on each trail. It's very portable in case you'd like to tuck it into a backpack, too! Good job!

I used this, along with resources on the internet, to plan a couple of day hikes to Grand Staircase National Monument last year. It seemed to be a decent guide and helped us pick out a nice hike in Lick Wash. I don't generally use guide books on the hike itself and I always refer to resources on the web as well, so I might not be best person to review this. If you are just trying to decide where to hike and figure out what options you have in the are you are in, I would recommend this book. (The Monument covers a pretty large area - we were staying in Page, AZ, so we stuck to the southermost hikes). I just wish we had more time to hike the area while we were there.