Day Hike! Olympic Peninsula, 3rd Edition: More Than 70 Trails You Can Hike in a Day

I bought this book and "Best Easy Day Hikes Olympics" in 5/2007. I found this book, "Day Hike! Olympic Peninsula ...", to be much more substantial.

I consider myself a moderate hiker and had no trouble traversing the trails described in this book in the time frame stipulated. When I'm hiking I'm not studying flowers or sitting still looking for birds. I usually trot along at the average pace that rangers have told me most hikers do, two miles an hour. That includes stopping to take photos, appreciate views and grazing in the occasional blueberry patch. Mostly, however, I'm there to hike. Day Hike! Olympic Peninsula is a good, concise, easy-to-use guide that provides perfectly useable directions to trailheads. A pet peeve of mine is wasting valuable outdoors time trying to navigate my way in a car to a trailhead. I never had that problem with this book. In fact, I appreciated the tip provided for the trailhead at the end of the 8-mile gravel road accessed near the Hurricane Ridge Visitors Center. I never would have known this narrow road leads to a trail. The walks listed are a good assortment for average day hikers. I only tried a few of them (Hoh River Trail being my favorite - not least of which is because there's basically no elevation gain and I saw 25 - 30 Roosevelt elk there!) so I can't vouch for the complaints of other reviewers. However, I've kept the book for future reference, meaning I'd definitely use it again. I can't wait to get back to the Pacific Northwest to explore more of the wonderful wilderness and hiking is the best way to do it. All in all I'd recommend this book. It's not perfect but for casual day hikers it can be mighty handy.

I purchased another book about hiking Mount Olympic, which was good but not really what we needed since we were doing all of our hiking as day hikes. If you don't buy this book and you plan to day hike Mount Olympic you will surely be wasting your time. You will spend most of your time on trails that were designed for backpackers. I know that you may not understand this comment but, if like us you backpack and day hike most of the time, you will understand the comment. Most of the trails in Mount Olympic are very long trails. The are not loop trails and some are 40-50 mile long through hiking trails. A day hiker cannot possibly cover 80% of these trails on a day hike. This book gives you just what you will need to make a decision on which trails to hike. It gives you a difficulty rating along with a beauty rating of 1-5 backpackers, meaning 5 is the best. I found these ratings to be very accurate discriptions of the beauty. Also it tells you each trails elevation gains. Which is very essential to this Floridian. You may have mountain goat legs but I don't. The ratings of easy to extremely difficult make for easy decisions. My son's who are late teenagers always choose the more difficult trails where my wife and I tend to choose the easier trails. This park is very diverse and without this book we could have wasted lots of times driving. Instead we spent our time just where we wanted to go. Happy hiking!!! The trip was worth it.

Not sure what problem one of the previous reviewers had with getting herself lost on the way to a trailhead, but her criticisms are completely off base. A LOT of longtime Olympics trail veterans know the author personally, because he's spent the better part of his life on these trails, and is undoubtedly better equipped to decribe them than someone from say...oh, Kansas. Based on our own extensive local knowledge, we can attest that this book is a worthy survey of some of the nation's greatest day-hiking lands, by one of the region's acknowledged local experts.

Most hiking guides are pretty dry, but this one is entertaining and fun to read. It's only been on the shelf for about a week, which obviously is not enough time to take all 70 of the hikes listed in this book.But I have read about all of the hikes and the writing style of this book makes the " talk" almost as nice as the "walk." There's a trail for just about every taste and every ability, from beginner to hardcore hiker.A real plus are the maps. They are topos, so they show the kind of terrain you'll be hiking, and the trail and direction of travel is clearly shown. There's also an elevation profile for each hike.Another feature I liked are the little capsules of each hike, right at the top of the description, so you don't have to scour through a bunch of stuff to find out whether you'll like the hike.I've got all the Olympic Peninsula hiking books, but this is the best one I've seen so far.