Appalachian Trail Data Book - 2003

Rating:
Summary: Just the Mileage without the Verbage
Review: I've used this little book with great success to help plan hikes for children along the Appalachian Trail. According to the back cover, "It consistently ranks No. 1 among the publications long-distance hikers take with them." I have no doubt this is so. Its is a small book filled with easily accessed information condensed from the 11 official Trail guidebooks.

This book is essentially a long chart listing what a hiker will encounter along the Appalachian Trail with mileage listed to one-tenth mile exactness. For example, in a matter of minutes, you can determine, that the distance along the trail from Pennsylvania route 309 to Hawk Mountain Road is 11.5 miles. If you wish to plan a hike on the Trail in, say, New Jersey, you simply find the NJ border (marked as 97.8 miles from NY/CT border and 63.1 miles from the PA/NJ border) and read down until you find a section that meets your needs. The locations of springs, shelters, privies, roads and other landmarks are listed in the order you will encounter them. For the hikers who need re-supply information, restaurants, stores and post offices (with zip code to send yourself supplies) are included.

Gleaning the same information from a normal guidebook will take much longer. Also, a normal guide book may be geared to day hikes while the reader of this book will be concerned more with multi-day hikes requiring springs and spots that the Trail crosses a road. This guide will help you consider starting/ending points other than that picked by the authors of the day-hike guide books.

On a recent (October 18, 2003) hike, I noticed a group of teenaged boys and a frustrated-looking adult. They had been unable to find the Eckville shelter. Their guide had indicated it was .2 miles along the trail southbound from Hawk Mountain Road. This guide indicated it was .2 miles EAST, rather than associating a specific mileage. The terse but accurate information in the Data Book helped us to find the shelter (its along Hawk Mountain Road east bound, downhill, from the trail).

If you need detailed descriptions of the Trail, you should consider the "Exploring the Appalachian Trail" series from Stackpole books, such as the one covering Maryland, PA, NJ, and NY by Scherer and Hopey. But even with that excellent guidebook, I found I referred back to the Data Book frequently and carried a photocopied page of the Data Book with me while hiking.

Note that this book will not describe the difficulty of a specific section of the trail. For that you will need other sources of information as well. On the other hand, if you frequently hike sections of the Appalachian Trail and will purchase more than one book on the topic, you will find this to be well worth its inexpensive cost.