Northern Trails (Catskill Trails; A Ranger's Guide to the High Peaks)

Catskill Trails offers rewarding hikes for every level of ability. Each hike is accompanied by a trail map, a photo, and a "key" to the hike supplying such useful information as where to park, trail difficulty, climb in elevation, distance traveled, and a short synopsis of the route itself.

The author, a conservation professional, has taken an interdisciplinary approach, drawing the latest information from geology, forest ecology, meteorology, wildlife biology, geography, economics, and history to offer a well-rounded picture of the Catskill Mountains as the hikes rise to the sky through levels of rock strata and ever-changing forests. The goal, as the author states, is for the reader to experience the hike and see the Catskills as "a natural historian, not a tourist", and to see not just the present, but the past as well ... and maybe even the future.

Written in a lyrical style that carries the reader swiftly along from trailhead to rocky precipice, while missing nothing along the way, Catskill Trails combines the eye of the scientist with the sensibility of the poet. The result is a very unusual synthesis -- a hiking guide that reads almost as well in an overstuffed armchair as along a trail-less ridge or windblown rock outcropping.