I've used the 1st and 2nd editions to plan many hikes, starting in 2016 with a five-day trip to view the eclipse from the summit of Downs Mountain. These are my favorite hiking guidebooks. The routes are well-researched and the writing is clear. The maps…well, we'll talk about this.
This photo illustrates why this book is needed. Goat Flats is a peneplain, a flattish seabed raised intact to 12,000'. It stretches for miles and is easy walking, but has no water and no three-foot area without a sharp rock, except for one place. Pallister guides you to The Oasis, a flat, sandy area along a creek below a huge permanent snowfield. And the view, you can judge for yourself. It was the only place where my dog and I could camp and summit Downs Mountain in time for the eclipse.
The book is not a guide for summiting peaks. If that's your goal, you want Joe Kelsey's *Climbing and Hiking in the Wind River Range*.
If you prefer to hike on trails, there are trail guides available.
Compared to Colorado, the Wind River Range is bigger and more rugged than our Wilderness Areas. Most places in Colorado, you can't hike more than three or four days without popping out on the other side of the range. Three or four days will barely get you into most parts of the Wind River Range.
All of the 2nd edition routes are loops. The 3rd edition has these additions:
- Eleven point-to-point hikes. Nine are north-south, two are east-west.
- Clearer maps of the 2nd edition routes (the first six chapters).
- 15-25 color photos of each route.
Point-to-point hikes are increasingly popular with thru-hikers and trail runners carrying ultralight backpacks (fastpackers). About two hundred Continental Divide Trail (CDT) thru-hikers go through the Wind River Range on the Fremont Trail each summer. According to Wikipedia, they voted this section as their favorite section of the CDT, and the Cirque of the Towers as their favorite place on the CDT. But I've talked a dozen or more CDT hikers on the Fremont Trail and, with one exception, none would consider taking a half-day to summit Fremont Peak. They had schedules and were carrying limited food. (On Knapsack Pass I was a day ahead of schedule and met two thru-hikers who were behind schedule, so I gave them a day of food to lighten my backpack.) Pallister's point-to-point hikes do not include a "alternative CDT" to the Fremont Trail and I can't picture CDT thru-hikers buying Pallister's book.
Then there are the trail runners, and Andy Skurka's Wind River High Route (WRHR).
https://andrewskurka.com/adventures/win ... igh-route/
I completed the WRHR last summer, as three (or five) loops over two (or three) summers.
Skurka's route and Pallister's routes have much in common. They go to the same places! But there's a different mindset. Skurka's route has Fastest Known Times (FKTs), now 1 day 13 hours for men and 2 days 5 hours for women. This is for 96 miles, 65 of which are off-trail, 64 of which are boulderfields, or at least that's my memory. Nine days would be a normal time.
Skurka's WRHR aims to be the route that stays closest to the Continental Divide from Wind River Peak to Downs Mountain, i.e., the length of the Wind River Range, without demanding mountaineering skills, e.g., not Bonney Pass. There's a sense of accomplishment, e.g., when I finished I notified my college's alumni magazine (with this picture of Gannett).
No one is going to post FKTs of Pallister's routes. They're for exploring the Wind River Range. Exploring was not on the minds of the few WRHR hikers I met. They, like the CDT thru-hikers, wanted to stay on the "official route." In contrast, I summitted Mount Febbas (13,474 ft) and nearly summitted Sunbeam Peak (13,446 ft); looped south of Wind River Peak to Coon Lake, Little Sandy Creek, and Temple Pass; skipped the Alpine Lakes to explore Fortress Lake, the Brown Cliff Lakes, the Goatpackers Bench, and the Shangra-la Lakes; and skipped West Sentinel Pass to go up Gannett Creek.
I'm going to make a hypothesis about the minds of trail runners: they can't read maps. I've led many backpacking trips and 90% of the people on my trips can't read maps. I have a rule that at some point on trips I tell the women to lead, and, as a rule, they refuse, saying that they prefer to follow the men. My guess is that they're afraid they'll get lost, even with me right behind them.
I've met many trail runners who have no idea where they are. Again, they go in groups, following someone who's been there before, who may or may not be able to read a map.
In other words, fastpacking is a sport developed from a combination of light backpacking gear (yay!), trail running shoes (yay!), and sharing GPS tracks on phones (not yay).
We need to talk about Pallister's maps. For the 2nd edition digital download, she printed maps from TOPO onto 8.5x11 sheets, drew the routes with highlighters, and then scanned the maps on a scanner. This was fine for the 2nd edition, where most routes fit on a few quads. The 2nd edition printed book has maps of each route showing just the lakes, passes, dashed trails, and dotted off-trail routes. These maps don't show mountains or topo lines so don't help you visualize the challenges of the routes, but they are clear and easy to transpose onto topo maps. Pallister intentionally doesn't provide GPS tracks because she believes that if you can't read a map you shouldn't be in the backcountry.
For the 3rd edition, the digital download has the minimalist lakes-and-dotted-lines maps from the printed 2nd edition book, for the routes that were in the 2nd edition. The eleven new point-to-point hikes have the highlighter-on-topo-scans. These are awful, because the routes are longer. I can't read the names of the lakes or the mountains or see the topo lines, even when I zoom in. She printed two-thirds of the Wind River Range on one 8.5x11 sheet, drew a route with highlighter, and then scanned the sheet.
Andy Skurka drew his WRHR in CalTopo, then saved it as a high-res PDF that you can zoom in. He drew the routes from waypoint to waypoint (passes and peaks) and left it up to the hiker to find their way between the waypoints.
Pallister draws the full routes but the 3rd edition maps leave out peaks and topo lines, or have unreadable names of lakes and mountains.
Either way excludes the trail runners who can't read maps.
The Cirque of the Towers suffers from overuse. Lonesome Lake has the highest fecal matter of any lake tested by the EPA (384x higher than safe levels). Pallister's guidebook helps hikers go into the 99% of the Wind River Range that isn't overused. Most hikes I go for days without seeing anyone. GPS apps solve the problem of hikers who can't read maps, but introduce new problems. If everyone is sharing a few GPS tracks, a few areas will be overused. One solution might be for Pallister's book (or similar guidebooks) to provide 57 GPS routes, or at least better maps.
The 3rd edition has 57 routes. Most are in the six- to ten-day range. Pallister is clear about the difficulty of each route. Most are rated in the 30s, 40s, or 50s.
If you buy the book, check that you get a bookmark, and don't lose it! The QR code on the bookmark is how you access the maps.
Pallister's estimated days reflect 1970s backpacks, which were twice the weight of current gear. I've found that I can consistently cut a day or two off of her schedules.
This review has turned out to be about who shouldn't buy this book:
- Climbers and mountaineers focused on summits
- On-trail hikers
- Thru-hikers intent on getting to Canada
- Trail runners who can't read maps
The person who should buy this book is an off-trail backpacker, who wants to do long, difficult hikes into remote areas, and can read a map.
If you've never hiked off-trail, should you buy this book? Absolutely! Ten hikes are listed for "off-trail novices."
Buy the 3rd edition for $40 + $8 shipping from the Great Outdoor Shop in Pinedale, Wyoming, (307) 367-2440, greatoutdoorshop.com.
My blog post about the WRHR: Always Be Exploring: Andy Skurka’s Wind River High Route.
https://medium.com/@tdkehoe/my-adventur ... 50877468c4
