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Rating: 
Summary: Good News - Bad News
Review: Bad news first.
-- Directions to trail heads are infuriatingly compressed, hard to read, and in some places silly (ex: Major state route paved highway intersections are identified with GPS coordinates.)
-- Despite the 2001 copyright, 7-1/2' maps names are not given, but the obsolete and no-longer-available 15' maps are given.
-- Some of the detail maps are not oriented north-up -- hard to use for our north-up oriented minds. Worse yet, the maps don't say where north is, despite the north arrow in the map legend that lies, since it always points up. Hard to orient yourself, even after you discover the lying arrow.
-- The maps have no scale.
-- No index. Unpardonable sin, especially in these days of computers.OK, now good-bad news:
-- Lots of GPS coordinates. But they are in a table following each route description, not embedded in the description. So you have to flip pages back and forth, and try to figure which set of coordinates apply to which text passage.
-- This is the only book that covers the area efficiently. Mike Kelsey's books cover larger areas. (Perhaps there are others that I have not found.) Ready for some good news?:
-- It appears appropriately comprehensive. I say appropriate, since it is not totally comprehensive about the area. This leaves room for independent exploration, and does not divulge secret last best places.
-- Use the nicely made table and overview map starting on p.45 to efficiently sort through the walks he describes in the rest of the book.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent guidebook for Cedar Mesa hiking
Review: I found this excellent book at the library. I was going to Cedar Mesa for a few days the following week with a group of adults and kids from western Colorado. I was not familiar with the area, although I'd lived in Utah for 6 years in the 80's. The author has the hikes divided into car, day, and backpack hikes with ratings for difficulty and time required to complete them. Each hike has a description, as well as GPS info. He has 64 hikes listed. We did one shorter day hike (SF Mule Canyon) on arrival and spent about 3 hours exploring a "car" hike area which had many ruins tucked into the cliffs (Mule Canyon Cave Towers). The ruins were accessible beneath the cliffs, though access is not straight forward, but not dangerous either. In the book the author says there is no route down to these, but we were able to get to them, including my 9 year old daughter. Perhaps he is reluctant to encourage people to climb down to them. If I return to the area, I would purchase this book to plan and use there. I'd also purchase the topo maps. Have fun.
Rating:
Summary: Author advocates too much wilderness
Review: I was dismayed to find, in the Introduction, urging from the author for readers to contact their congressional representative to designate excessive amounts of Utah acreage as wilderness areas, thus rendering them useless to much of the population that lives in these areas, of which I am one, and many who visit. While I believe that these areas should be kept from vandalism and destruction, I also believe educating the populace on the proper treatment of the land is a better alternative to closing off access to many who do not have the physical ability to hike long distances to see the beauties of nature.
Not wishing to support those who want to keep my family and I from enjoying and responsibly utilizing the land around us, I considered returning this book. But in spite of the author's extremist environmentalism views, the book offers good descriptions, maps, and photographs of some beautiful sites that I am anxious to explore with my young family. So, I will keep the book and try to ignore the preaching.
Rating:
Summary: Extremely helpful
Review: The trail and access descriptions are accurate. The GPS coordinates were invaluable. I only wish the author had also provided GPS coordinates for some of the sites along the way. There are occassional small lapses in accuracy on the listings of the time it rakes to hike from one milestone to the next. It is useful to complement this guidebook with a comprehensive map such as the TrailsIllustrated series which provides mileage for some of the same routes for which Peter Tassoni provides GPS and times.
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