Day Hikes Yellowstone, 3rd: 54 Great Hikes

by Robert Stone

Yellowstone National Park is a magnificent area with beautiful, dramatic scenery and incredible hydrothermal features. Within its 2.2 million acres lies some of the earth's greatest natural... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573420247
• ISBN13: 9781573420242
• Release Date: February 2000
• Publisher: Day Hike Books
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 0.53 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Great list of hikes, but keep your wits with you.

I just came back from Yellowstone, where our family (including teenage kids) hiked for 10 days. We went through almost all hikes listed by the book in Old Faithful area (with a single exception) and a few around Canyon and West Thumb. The book has three excellent qualities: 1. Every hike has a good description: you can clearly understand what you are going to see, so you can decide if you are interested. 2. Every hike has a schema, which together with the description lets you find your way on land. In fact, even though the books lists real maps one could use, we never needed one. 3. The hikes listed in the book are really interesting ones. Planning our hikes I was at concerned by the shortness of the hikes in the book: the majority of them are under 5 miles round trip. We found out that 5 miles is the optimal length of a hike at that altitude, at least for our family. Above that and the hike became a drag and we returned physically and emotionally exhausted. 5 miles gave us pleasant feeling of accomplishment and just enough appetite to enormously enjoy our dinners. Most of the hikes also include options of adjusting the length of a hike in accordance with personal preferences. One issue we had is that nature and people kept on changing the conditions and some of the recommendations in the book didn't apply any more. For example, Clear Lake area around South Rim of the canyon was closed. We could not find any trace of the trail around Queens Laundry itself (and believe me, we tried). That's why you need to read the descriptions carefully and have a general understanding of where you are and where are other trails in respect to your location. Again, quality of schemas and descriptions in the book was such that we were able to find our way even without maps. We hiked in many places using great many trail guides and this is one of the best.

Excellent straightforward hiking guide

This book is not necessarily a replacement for the many other good books about hiking Yellowstone's trails - but for many hikes, this one provides the best and most straightforward descriptions of trails to the many fascinating features of Yellowstone National Park, including some gems that others overlook (try finding other trail descriptions for hikes to the four lovely waterfalls near Cooke City and Silver Gate, for example, or a better trail map to the Specimen Petrified Forest). It has become an indispensible element of my backpack.

Basic clear info on day hikes

I own many books on Yellowstone but for the hikes I like this one the best. It has 82 hikes of which I have done several this year. I am going back summer 2009 and have color-coded the pages as to which day I will do what hikes. Some will be repeated. He gives a good description of what you can expect to see on the hikes as well as elevation gain, how much time walking straight through and the distance as well as which hikes connect to other hikes. His drawn black and white maps are not filled with info, just the basics, which I liked. This book is just info on hikes that an average healthy person could complete, just for the day not backcountry and its just on the hikes no history or where to eat and sleep info which for that information I liked reading Yellowstone Treasures by Janet Chapple which she is releasing updated this spring 2009.

A Little Disappointing

This is useful book but it could have been a lot better. It includes a good selection of short hikes and the maps are adequate but given the size of the book it could have included a lot more detail. The trail descriptions are brief and dry and don't tell you much about the areas you will be going through or what you are likly to see. Contrast this with Day Hiking Yellowstone by Tom Carter which includes much more interesting detail about plants, animals, geology and history in a much smaller book. Still, Stone's book is well worth getting because it includes a few hikes I haven't seen elsewhere. Example: A trail with a good chance of seeing Moose in the wild within easy walking distance of the motels of West Yellowstone.