John Muir Trail: The Essential Guide to Hiking America's Most Famous Trail

Description

Elizabeth Wenk's authoritative guide describes the 212-mile John Muir Trail, running from Yosemite Valley to the summit of Mt. Whitney. John Muir Trail provides all the necessary planning information, including up-to-date details on wilderness and permit regulations, food resupplies, trailhead amenities, and travel from nearby cities. Useful essentials are updated GPS coordinates and maps for prominent campsites (along with an updated list of sites along the trail), trail junctions, bear boxes, and other points of interest. The trail descriptions also include natural and human history to provide a workout for both body and mind -- a must-have for any Muir Trail enthusiast. Note that the text includes the southbound trail description, while the full guide with the northbound description is available as a separate ebook product.

Since childhood, Elizabeth Wenk has hiked and climbed in the Sierra Nevada with her family. After she started college, she found excuses to spend every summer in the Sierra, with its beguiling landscape, abundant flowers, and near-perfect weather. During those summers, she worked as a research assistant for others and completed her own Ph.D. thesis research on the effects of rock type on alpine plant distribution and physiology. But much of the time she hikes simply for leisure. Obsessively wanting to explore every bit of the Sierra, she has hiked thousands of on- and off-trail miles and climbed more than 600 peaks in the mountain range. Recently she has directed her wanderings to gather data for several Wilderness Press titles and to introduce her two young daughters to the wonders of the mountains. She lives in Sydney, Australia.

"An incredible accomplishment by an incredible researcher who is very attentive and considerate to the needs of her audience." —Roleigh Martin, Backpacking Light "The very best way to get the most out of your experience in the wilderness is to understand it, and there is no better way to do that than to carry along Elizabeth Wenk's John Muir Trail: The essential guide to hiking America's most famous trail. The fifth edition has just been released and--to use a software analogy--it's a major upgrade." --Ray Rippel, author of the JMTbook (Planning your Thru-Hike of the John Muir Trail ebook)