Yellowstone National Park Guide
Lonely Planet Book Covers Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks
Latest edition of Lonely Planet guide to Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks has 20 itineraries, 40 hikes & trips to Jackson Hole and Cody, & Beartooth Highway.
This guide to the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks (not to mention Jackson Hole, Cody and the Beartooth Highway) is one of a new series of excellent updated National Parks guidebooks published by Lonely Planet. The guides are all about 300 pages in length, and though compact enough to fit in the daypack they cram a lot in, including an opening 16-page spread of maps and color photos that, quite literally, set the scene.
The books are all to a similar format, and all include, for example, chapters on Kids & Pets, Environment, History, Activities and Itineraries. Each of the four reviews will focus on different aspects of the contents, so to get a fuller picture of what's in each of the guides, read all four reviews. The links will appear below as the reviews appear.
Interviews
As with all the titles in this series, to add some depth to the book the authors have included short interviews with people who really know the National Parks. They add several fresh pairs of eyes, and give the eader some insider knowledge. For Yellowstone and Grand Teton they include:
- Tom Murphy, Yellowstone's photographer supreme
- Nathan Varley, a wildlife biologist specializing in wolves
- Drew Hardesty, Teton rescue ranger
- Wilton Springer, 10-year-old son of a Teton rescue ranger
Kids and Pets
The last of the interviews above, with Wilton Springer, appears in the special Kids and Pets chapter, which is common to all the books. They cover trip planning, let you know what kids and pets) can and can't do in the National Parks. They also have some great suggestions, like 'Best Hikes for Little Legs' (all within 2 miles of a road), the 'Coolest Camps' and 'Seven Rainy Day Refuges.' The Pets section covers local boarding kennels, and Horse Trails and Equestrian Facilities.
Activities
There's a long 17-page section on activities, both summer and winter. This section includes tables with potted summaries of the 21 Yellowstone hikes and 10 Grand Teton hikes included in the book, with cross-references to the appropriate pages. There's information too, with contact details, for other activities including mountain biking, rock climbing and mountaineering, horseback riding, rafting, kayaking, canoeing, fishing swimming and photography in summer, and in winter the book covers skiing, snowshoeing, snowmobiling, snowboarding, dogsledding and snowcoach tours.
Summary
The back cover of this new Lonely Planet guide to the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks claims that the authors hiked 280 miles of trails and put in over 2000 hours of in-park research. The result is 312 pages that are both practical and inspiring.
The Lonely Planet Guide to the Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks, 2nd edition, was published in April 2008 at $19.99 in the USA and £14.99 in the UK.
Other guides in the National Parks series are:
For further details visit the Lonely Planet website
