Hiking Grand Canyon National Park: A Guide to the Best Hiking Adventures on the North and South Rims

To me, this is the Grand Canyon book to get if you are planning on hiking the trails. It has great illustrations of the trails and elevations. You can easily follow the trail illustrations from one trail to another because they tell you the page number of the connecting trail. The textual descriptions are excellent and very easy to follow. The trails are broken up logically and are easy to piece together for extended trips into the canyon. If you are looking for a book with telephone numbers of who to call for reservations and all that, this is not the book. Fine with me because that information is always changing and isn't that what they made the internet for? The size is a bit large to be considered a pocket book but is easily packable. The size actually helps with the illustrated maps as it makes them what I consider to be perfect for trail use. I prefer to make copies (which I did not do if it is a violation of some copyright) of the trails I am going to hike and leave the book behind. The copies are handy for the inevitable rain that always comes. Put them in a zip lock bag with the one you need on top...this book does not stress much about people being physically prepared to hike the canyon. If they don't physically prepare, what makes you think they bother to read before they hit the trail? I have yet to see a sick person on the trail with a book about the canyon in their hand. The book does rate each of the trails with regard to difficulty. I have several books on the Grand Canyon and for planning and hiking the trails, this is the one I would recommend over all the others.

The overview and locator maps proved very useful. Posting the elevation gain and loss (as well as a plot showing where these occured) was very helpful in negotiating the trails. Precautions and general hiking information in the front sections of the book were very thorough.

We used this book exclusively to pick the trails we wanted to attempt. The book was very helpful, explaining details such as elevation change, estimated hike times to various points on the trails, and ratings of the trails' difficulty. The book also included directions to each trailhead, and other information such as weather and hiking conditons. We had our 6 and 9 year olds with us, and the book contained a listing of easy to difficult day hikes for families. I found this book very valuable in preparation for our daily hikes into the Grand Canyon.