While guidebooks lack the high-resolution pictures and crowd-sourced content about trails found in the digital world, they offer hikers information in a tangible, time-tested format that makes them a pleasure to use. Flipping through a guidebook and being inspired to plan trips to a new area is like unwrapping a gift that keeps on giving. Turning the pages on a years old, dog-eared guidebook where I’ve done most of the trips and made notes in the margin is a great way to take a trip down memory lane and an analog alternative to simply looking up pictures posted on social media.

Historical equivalents of modern guidebooks helped (or hurt, as some were notoriously inaccurate) pioneers travel to the American West on the Oregon Trail and other routes such as the California Trail and the Mormon Trail, although those texts were more practical than recreational. Today’s guidebooks help hikers enjoy a landscape for a few days or weeks at a time, rather than guiding them cross-continent to pursue better opportunities. Nevertheless, I think it is safe to say that many hikers have taken the trip of a lifetime after doing copious research via maps and guidebooks and been better prepared for the trek.

The Benefits of Paper Hiking Guidebooks

During the cold, dark evenings of winter, perusing through guidebooks can be a great way to revisit places you’ve hiked and start planning for new places to visit in the more accommodating seasons of the year. Sitting around drinking coffee and immersing myself in a guidebook and corresponding map have gotten me through the dreariest winter days. Guidebooks offer an inspiring mix of escapism and practical planning that I find to be more fulfilling than just sifting through the results of internet searches for information on trails. After a winter of perusing guidebooks, the hard part is prioritizing which hypothetical trips to do in the limited hiking time available before the snow flies again and covers the high country.

Well-written guidebooks can be amusing and entertaining as you travel through landscapes with the author and their insight, observations, and humor. My favorite guidebooks are those where the author strikes a perfect balance between naturalist and comedian. Guidebooks for the Red River Gorge area of Kentucky Red River Gorge Trails and Hinterlands, a Guide to Unofficial Trails by Jerrell Goodpaster strike this balance with excellence. Tim Homan’s guidebook to the Joyce Kilmer-Slickrock Wilderness and Citico Creek Wilderness areas in North Carolina and Tennessee contains an excellent, and all-too familiar for most hikers, description of unmaintained trails as being not easily followed or easily enjoyed (to paraphrase), a thought which I’ve used to describe certain trails to curious hikers. The glowing, adulatory descriptions in guidebooks can also be memorable and it’s remarkable at how many different ways guidebook authors have come up with words to describe similar landforms, such as arches or alpine lakes. Strong legs and strong vocabularies seem to be characteristics held by most persons practicing the craft of writing guidebooks.

The physical aspect of guidebooks lend them, like pretty much all books and physical mediums of art and expression, fairly well to collecting for persons who have that proclivity. While I try to live a fairly “minimal” lifestyle in terms of purchase of inanimate objects, which is a bit of a misnomer when compared to most of this planet’s inhabitants who would be shocked at the amount of gear I own that goes into my “lightweight” backpack on each trip, I do have a tendency to collect guidebooks. Thrift stores, used book stores, and library book sales can be great places to buy cheap and often out-of-print guidebooks. While it’s not a great idea to plan your vacation on 36-year-old information found in a guidebook, they do give you decent insight into general areas and landscapes and make for nice coffee table displays.

Guidebook Limitations

It would be irresponsible to write an essay in appreciation of guidebooks without noting that they do indeed have certain limitations. Most notable of these is the fact they become almost instantly outdated as soon as they are published. Forest fires, landslides, trail closures, deferred maintenance – all these issues make trails that have a five-star appeal on paper turn into a nightmare on the ground. Quick fact checking on the internet combined with a call to the nearest ranger station can help mitigate these unpleasant surprises. On the plus side, out-dated guidebooks can be one of the only ways of knowing what lies at the end of an unmaintained trail – providing impetus for hardy hikers to seek out a reward that they will likely get to enjoy in solitude.

Final Thoughts

Guidebooks exist for most places with any significant concentration of use and many national parks have multiple guidebooks, even upwards of a dozen or more for the most popular. Some wilderness areas or parts of national forests lack any type of printed descriptions at all, other than what is compiled and released by the land management agencies. Some off-trail areas don’t have chapters in guidebooks, or any digital information about them, and that’s not a bad thing. Some hikers tend to gravitate toward those “black holes” of wilderness…no trails on the map, no mentions in guidebooks, no online trip reports…and relish in the feeling of exploration that venturing into such an area provides. While I appreciate guidebooks in the fullest, I also sincerely believe that some spots should remain something of a mystery to stay truly wild, their secrets shown only to those who take the time and effort to see them firsthand. The best guidebooks in this respect may provide just enough information to get you started, but leave further exploration up to the reader. For a multitude of hiking guidebooks you can browse a wide selection covering just about any area you could imagine here at Amazon.com.

Editor's Note: This article originally appeared in Issue 33 of TrailGroove Magazine. You can read the original article here.