National Audubon Society Regional Guide to the Rocky Mountain States

Rating:
Summary: Audubon's Rocky Mt. States Field Guide: A great buy
Review: As with all of the National Audubon Society's field guides, the "National Audubon Society Field Guide to the Rocky Mountain States" is a most worthwhile purchase, perfect as a gift or for your own collection. The guide is durable and very portable, which makes it well suited for use in the outdoors. More importantly, it has excellent content. Despite its small size, the field guide contains a wealth of information. In addition to the usual focus on flora and fauna species, there is information on constellations, parks, ecosystems, and more. While the depth and detail of the information in the various sections is not vast, the breadth of subject matter more than makes up for this; the information presented is ideal for a general field guide. Moreover, the book is beautiful, filled with gorgeous color photographs. Residents of the Rocky Mountain states and non-residents will both love it.

Rating:
Summary: Very pretty, but kinda useless
Review: First, the positive: this is a very complete and very pretty-looking guidebook. It does cover just about everything from the night sky to lichens and rocks. I can imagine an eastern tourist leafing through, anticipating all the wonderful things they'll see on their trip through Rocky Mountain National or Glacier park.

However, in the field, the guide is next to useless, as there are no keys, no list of the details and differences that make, for example, one tree a Ponderosa and another a Lodgepole pine. The only way to disern what exactly you are look through the book randomly until you happen upon a photo (generally too small to supply necessary detail) that looks kinda similar to whatever it is you are trying to identify.

This book is best at capturing the endless possibilities of our Rocky Mountains, a compendium of all the wonderful things you may run across. It won't however help you actually find them.

Rating:
Summary: Best field guide for your pack in most Rockies trips
Review: This is not the most thorough of all field guides imaginable but it is easily the best that I can imagine that you could take with you in the field. It really is pocket-sized! It will fit in the shirt pocket of my long-sleeved flannel shirts, though it's too heavy (450pp.) to be entirely comfortable there. It fits better in roomy pants pockets, jacket pockets, or the side pocket of a day pack.

The book has everything, including some geology and habitat information as well as mammals, reptiles, amphibians, insects, birds and plants. It's exhaustive for the mammals that I've seen in the Rockies and nearly exhaustive for birds. It has good, small pictures of everything with information about ranges and seasons. There is plenty of information, clearly organized, to help you identify things that you see.