Sierra North: 100 Back-Country Trips

Rating:
Summary: Great trip planning resource
Review: Great trip planning resource - more overnighters than Sierra South.

Rating:
Summary: First-rate hiking book
Review: I enjoy all of the Winnett books because they are accurate, fun to read and reliable. This book has little chapters on over 100 trips in the Sierra range, and the descriptions of each trek are a total delight. So often these hiking books neglect to tell you how to reach the trailhead and oftentimes they don't provide detailed instructions. Winnett never makes this mistake. You will not need a separate map to locate any of the trailheads, his maps and written instructions are first-rate. In fact, there is even a nifty fold-out map sewn into the rear pocket so you can tote it along on any of your journeys. Equally interesting is that this book doesn't merely give elevation gains, difficulty ratings and desriptions of the trail conditions. These are vital to know, but Winnett also includes little bits of information of what kinds of wild flowers you will encounter, birds, wildlife and other little nuggets neglected in other guides.

The book is supposed to be only for overnight backpacking trips, but there are many trails here that can be used for day hikes. These trips will be in the 10-16 mile range and any strong hiker can easily do these hikes in one day. If you do choose to go the multi-day backpacking route, Winnett describes water sources, camping sites and addresses whether bears or marmots might be a problem for you. Most importantly, he tells you where to find water and whether the water source is reliable throughout the whole year.

I can't recommend this guide highly enough. Even if you're an armchair hiker, you'll derive many hours of vicarious joy from this guide.

Rating:
Summary: A Good trail Book
Review: My wife and I are volunteer forest service workers in Los Padres National Forest, Ventana Wilderness. We maintain the Pine Ridge Trail, and spur trails, between Big Sur Ranger Station and Sykes Hot springs (with lots of help from friendly hikers). We enjoy exploring other areas for backpacking and camping but don't want to waste our precious leisure time searching for the better hikes, so we use good trail books, like this one, to plan our trips.

Sierra North covers selected better trails in Yosemite National Park, and the following wilderness areas: Mokelumne, Carson Iceberg, Emigrant, Hoover, Ansel Adams and the northern end of John Muir. It meets most of our demands for identifying the better hikes to explore in a convenient easy to use book. It provides good directions to the trailheads and descriptions of the trails, camps and attractions along the way. It provides a description of how strenuous the hikes are and has a neat graph to show the gain and loss of altitude over the distance for each trail. It has a "take out" folded map showing the trails and trailheads and it has a convenient table summarizing information on all the trails to help with trip selection. It is small enough to carry on a backpacking trip.

Some down side knits are. The map is not sufficient for backcountry hiking so, you still need to buy a good trail, contour map. The instructions of how to use the altitude gain and loss graph are located in the Maps chapter (hard to find) instead of in the Introduction with the other information on how to use this book. There is no small single page map showing the general location of all the trails; therefore, you must take out and unfold the larger map each time you want to check a location.

There is a companion book titled "Sierra South" which covers Kings Canyon National Park, Sequoia National Park and John Muir Wilderness. My wife and I use both of these books and recommend them for others. These are good trail books to get you started in one of the above areas. After you make somehikes and wish to explore a specific area more thoroughly, you may want a trail book that specializes in that one area.