The Dayhiker's Guide
to the National Parks

Look Inside

Small but Useful Maps

1 Book for All 63 Parks

Nearly 200 Trail Maps

280 of the Best Trails

Plus Essential Information

Find Your Trails

Clear descriptions of each trail and gorgeous photography make it a joy to page through this book...

The Dayhiker's Guide to the National Parks by Michael Joseph Oswald is the book I wish I had when I first started visiting America's national parks.

This was a gift for my husband. It's his favorite National Park book.

Honestly, there is so much information here!

Clean, concise and accurate descriptions. The maps are incredibly useful.

This is the dayhiking handbook for National Park lovers. Trails range from 0.3 to 30 miles, averaging 5.9 miles. Of the 280 trails, 46 are easy, 107 are moderate, 119 are strenuous, and 8 are extreme. But many short and easy trails are mentioned in the “More Trails” sections. There will be some disagreement about distances. I chose to have a common baseline, measuring trails out in Illustrator from USGS maps. (I made a spreadsheet to compare NPS, AllTrails, my Garmin Tracks, and the USGS distances. Quite a few agree, many do not.) Might have to get back out there with a measuring wheel!

The important thing is to provide a curated list of our National Parks’ best hiking trails, and that’s exactly what this book offers.

And, perhaps oddly, I feel the best thing I did in this book is listing approximately how many parking spaces are at each trailhead. Unless there’s a shuttle, crowds are proportional to parking lots. Some are huge. Some aren’t.

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