Middle Fork Guide : Seattle's closest mountains

Rating:
Summary: A useful resource
Review: The Mid fork is a splendid, wild, wooly, and undocumented place; for anybody interested in exploring it, this is an very useful resource. Carl Dreisbach knows the Mid Fork well and writes about it in an engaging, literate style. I have consulted it often as a source of ideas and guide to possiblities for trail and off-trail travel.

One thing to be aware of: many of his off-trail scrambling routes are really climber's routes. Using any guide book requires some "calibration"; it's hard to compare this book to, say those spring bros "100 hikes" books because the philosophy is so different. As far as I'm concerned, the "100 hikes" books greatly overestimate the time and difficulty of anything and everything, and Dreisbach conversely underrepresents the time and difficulty of anything and everything. For the climb-literate, his ratings of technical difficulty are generally lower than what Fred Beckey would assign; to me a Fred Beckey third class means I don't need a rope, though I might be a bit scared from time to time; a Dreisbach mention of "third class" means, probably should have a rope along and might want to use it.

Another caveat: his little schematic maps are inadequate used alone and should be used only in company with a good topo map, preferably the 1:24000 7-1/2 minute maps. Regarding ascent routes, Dresibach's described routes are often interesting, but generally not the easiest way up.

For the trail-inclined, I would say this is still a useful book, because there are quite a few unmarked and informal trails in the Mid Fork that you can learn about otherwise only by, say, trying to get to Marten lake and discovering an unmarked trail on your intended bushwack route.

Rating:
Summary: Great for Hikers
Review: This is a really great book for hikers and adventures. A must have! Get it you won't regret it!

Rating:
Summary: Not what I expected
Review: You cannot plan a trip on any of the off-trail routes based upon the information in this book. It has lots of nice information about plants and large stands of old growth forest. This is a nice touch which many guidebooks simply overlook. Most of the offtrail routes have little more than a couple of sentences. This is not a Beckey Guide by nay means.