60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Raleigh

The triangle is a great area to go hiking and this book does an excellent job recommending hikes and getting you to the trail. The trails are alphabetized, grouped according to length, difficulty, how secluded they are etc. It's very easy to find a trail to fit your mood. My only complaint is with the map that shows where all the trails are. They numbered the trails 1-60 on the map but in order to find out what page the description of that trail is on you have to go to the index to look up the page number (and vice versa). It doesn't seem like that big a hassle but when you're looking at several different trails it quickly becomes very annoying. If they had labeled the trail with the page number that it's description is found on it would have made the process much easier. Despite that annoyance we've hiked about half the trails in the book and have been quite pleased with all but two. I recommend this to anyone new to the area who isn't familiar with the local parks yet.

Since recently moving to the Triangle area, I've been looking for walking trails to enjoy with my dog. This book has been very helpful in describing a number of beautiful walks in the Raleigh area. It includes all of the general information for each area such as length, difficulty, access and hiking time but also gives anecdotes on nearby activities and lists of different types of hikes such as those good for children, historic hikes and those for cyclists. One notable hike I've taken is the one at Harris Lake - a reservoir created for the Harris Nuclear Power plant. It is a very quiet and beautiful trail, leading you almost five miles through swamps, forests of loblolly pines and lots of wildlife, all eerily within sight of the cooling towers! The only drawback of this book is that the maps can be difficult to read. Often there is no scale, and north is not necessarily located at the top of the map. All in all, the book is definitely worth buying for its succinct discriptions, variety of hikes and fairly accurate maps.