An excellent guide - trail by trail - to great Southwestern walks. Graded by length and ease, with information on pet access and disabled accessibility, each trail also comes with a chatty description that highlights the scenery and the ecology and gives helpful advice on footwear and attire. Lavishly illustrated, the landscapes are beckoning. I want to rush and try them all. A handsome and useful guide.

Thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC in exchange for an unbiased review.

This book enters a crowded space. There are already numerous hiking guides for the Southwest Canyon Country, and several specifically describing the Four Corners area. Alas, I don't think this book adds anything new or anything that is not covered better in other offerings. In fact, there are some important things it gets wrong.
Curiously for a guidebook, the first thing this book gets wrong is geography. It claims to be a guide to the National Parks of the Four Corners. The Four Corners region is an area immediately surrounding the point where four states—Utah, Colorado, Arizona, and New Mexico—meet. There is only one National Park in this Region (Mesa Verde). The state of New Mexico is not covered in the book at all, some of the hikes mentioned in the book are not in National Parks, and many are quite a long way outside the Four Corners area.
The hikes listed are characterized as "easy," which they are. This is not a bad thing and is likely to be of interest to most casual tourists. However, the selection of hikes chosen is very limited: they are the quintessential hikes in their respective areas, and thus are easy to find for free by a simple internet search or a quick visit to any source for tourist information for a given area. Other guidebooks for these areas are much more comprehensive.
The book is illustrated with many photographs, some of which are inexcusably amateurish: not especially well composed, sometimes showing technical flaws (e.g., poor focus), and some are garishly processed (see for example the very obvious and poorly done blend of the sky in the image on p.9 and in the double-spread image on p..22-23, the out-of-focus elements on p. 36-37, and others). In a time when there are more serious hobbyist and professionals photographers offering high quality work than ever before, and an abundance of excellent inexpensive stock photography available to authors, there is no reason for this.
The saving grace for this book could have been its emphasis on natural history. Alas, here, too, the information offered is riddled with errors. Some examples: on p.46, a buckthorn bush is misidentified as wax currant, on p.55 a winding mariposa lily is misidentified as a sego lily (Utah's state flower), on p.60 a Utah daisy is misidentified as rose heath, the caption on p.90 claims Bryce Canyon to be on the eastern edge of bristlecone pine range when in fact there are bristlecone pines in the mountains of Colorado and New Mexico, on p.135 a sagebrush bush is misidentified as rubber rabbitbrush, etc.
The upshot of all this: if you are going to purchase a guidebook for hiking the Southwest Canyon Country, there are much better options; and if you are specifically interested in the Four Corners region, you will find very little that is relevant to it in this book.

This is an awesome handbook that every visitor to the four corners area needs to have on hand.

All of the lovely national parks have some unique spots to hike to. This little nugget of awesome information shares the length of the trails, the rate of the trails (easy vs. moderate) and all that you can look for on the trail. It also goes into details, with photos, of the types of fauna and foliage in the area. The back of the book, with an index, categorizes each group (animal vs. plant vs. insects, etc). The pictures are also fantastic to refer to.

I highly recommend this one for the four corners area. I'll be grabbing a personal copy since I live in the area. This will be fun to go see all the attractions and it will be easy hikes that average about one and half miles. Perfect!

#NetGalley #SouthwestCanyonCountrysBestNatureWalks #RoddyScheer