Don't Waste Your Time in the Canadian Rockies: The Opinionated Hiking Guide [Paperback]

I liked the premise of this book, but ultimately found it too hard to use as a single-reference guide for vacationing hikers (as opposed to residents and more frequent visitors) looking for the best realistic day hikes (or half-day hikes) in the Canadian Rockies. I think this is an ideal guide for residents and frequent visitors to the Rockies who know the area well, but less than ideal if you are trying to locate the best family day hikes. One problem is that area maps and other references use different names for the same hikes, so it can be hard to determine if this guide is talking about the same trail as your map. Another issue is that a desirable half-day hike could be buried in a description of a not-so-desirable long or overnight hike. I would also prefer more detailed maps.

I also find it curious that the authors seemed to downgrade a hike if any portion involved hiking through the forest. I think that can be a big plus, particularly if the forest portion offers a change of scenery.

Since the Canadian Rockies covers so much territory, this guide might more helpful if it had one volume that covered day hikes and another volume for overnight or backpack trips. Or perhaps one volume that covers more hikes in Banff and Yoho National Parks in greater detail, and another volume for Jasper National Park.

My wife & I are from Houston, Texas and our annual backpacking trips are the only time we get to see the mountains. Because of this, every trip is precious to us and I always do extensive research on deciding on where to go. After reading this book, we ended up doing a trip that has turned out to be one our favorites of all times - a 2007 trip to Assiniboine.

We hiked in from Sunshine Village and saw spectacular scenery from the minute we started the trip. We ended up base camping near Lake Magog and doing several of the recommended day trips - all of which still rank as some of the most beautiful scenery we've ever seen. The advice in this book was spot-on: the high spots were truly amazing (Lake Magog, Nub Peak and Windy Ridge) and the "low" points were indeed mundane (Camp Porcupine wasn't bad, but not nearly as beautiful as everything else).

This book was helpful for the following reasons:

At the start of the book, all 138 hikes are listed with their rating (1-4 Bootprints - 4 being the best), the type of trip (backpacking, day hikes, or shoulder season trip) and overview maps to show where everything is in relation to each other. This makes zeroing in a trip very quick and easy.

More importantly, once you find a trip that peaks your interest, the candid advice about each trip really lets you know what to expect: how good is the scenery, is one trail better than another to get to a point of interest, how crowded/popular the trail is, and any other fact about a trail that will help you make a decision.

When I did my planning for our 2007 trip, I found 3-4 trips that really interested me and started reading in detail about each trip. The advice was clear enough for me to quickly figure out which type of trip suited our hiking style. Most guidebooks only offer pages and pages of descriptions about the trail, but never strong opinions (usually leaving me to search the internet for the opinion of others). While this book has the pages and pages of trail description, it was the opinions offered in this book that made the difference and allowed me to quickly decide on a trip.

For anyone planning a trip to the Canadian Rockies, I'd highly recommend this book. And if you're up for it, don't miss Assiniboine - it was AMAZING!

This is a great book if you're struggling to find a list of good hikes. The authors provide plenty of detail about how to get to the hike and what to look for. The book is not perfect though and you`ll want to look for extra information about each hike before attempting it. It`s been our experience that the authors consistently understate the amount of time you should expect to complete a hike by about 20%, while most other guide books with the same routes have more realistic time estimates. The book has many great pictures that give you a great idea about what`s in store. The maps in the back of the book are nearly useless, showing only a rough estimate of the path you`ll be following and no geographic information any more specific than a blob for a lake or a symbol for a mountain summit. I`m not sure how the authors calculated their route distances but in our group we usually have 3 GPS to record our tracks and always end up one to two kilometers longer than expected from the book. I`m write it off to an anomaly if it were only a single tracklog but when we have multiple track logs showing identical distance travelled with a significant difference from the book I question it`s validity.