Review by Hal Walter
Outdoors – December 1994 – Colorado Central Magazine
Flyfishing the High Country
By John Gierach
Published in 1984 by Pruett
ISBN: 0-87108-662-X
Hiking Trails of Central Colorado
By Bob Martin
Third edition published in 1989 by Pruett
ISBN: 0-87108-787-1
Colorado Cycling Guide
By Jean and Hartley Alley
Published in 1990 by Pruett
ISBN: 0-87108-768-5
If you love someplace, write about it. If it gets all jacked up, it’s your own fault. If it doesn’t, nobody read your book.
— a jaded reviewer of guidebooks
It’s always a bad idea to ask me to write reviews about guidebooks. For starters, I’m the kind of person who never uses these things on the off-chance they might cloud the spirit of discovery. Plus, I can usually tell more about an area from a USGS tops map than from any guidebook.
Moreover, I hold a certain amount of contempt for the writers of such books, lumping them into the uncreative category and blaming them for the hordes of humans they often send into places I love. Other than to turn a buck by indirectly exploiting relatively untraveled places, there is really no socially redeeming motive.
Nevertheless, here I am getting fired up to tell you all about Flyfishing the High Country, Hiking Trails of Central Colorado, and Colorado Cycling Guide. What I hate most about these books is that they are actually fairly well done.
In Flyfishing the High Country, author John Gierach explains the sanctity of prime fishing spots and his motive for not revealing them. Then he goes to great detailed lengths to tell the world how to catch mountain trout. Why not just train up the Colorado National Guard to carpet-bomb every mountain valley containing high lakes, beaver ponds, and streams?
Gierach writes with a certain passion that makes me wish he had written about golf instead. He lets on that a stream can be as good a place to fish as a lake, and that high-country fish feed opportunistically and will strike almost any pattern of fly at any given time. Many times I’ve caught fish in streams with goofy-looking unnamed flies while some sap was trying to match the hatch on the lake above.
I did notice one inaccuracy — the author states twice that grasshoppers are found only at lower elevations. I have caught grasshoppers on the shores of many very high Central Colorado lakes and my journal notes that I observed numerous grasshoppers on a high ridge of 12,000 feet in early October. Suppose Gierach really knows this and was just trying to fake some folks out? Deceptive guidebook writing could be a noble cause.
Also there are embarrassingly obvious typos, the kind that sometimes get put there by electronic scanners reading paper manuscripts. It’s something you might expect when you spend $1.95 for a publication like the one you’re reading, but don’t much care for when you’ve shelled out $9.95 for a glossy-covered paperback of a little more than 100 pages.
A more classic style of guidebook is Hiking Trails of Central Colorado, which tells readers exactly where to go, how to drive to the trailhead, where to look to see a view, where you’ll have to cross a creek or scramble over rocks, and how much elevation you’ll gain between certain points along the way. You even get black-and-white photographs of what you’ll see on many of these hikes. Also included is a photo-copied topo map for each stroll. Author Bob Martin writes in a precise descriptive phrase that conjures up visions of him walking the trail, notebook in hand, reporter style.
So, with a book like this the question arises: Why even go? I’ve been on a number of these routes and I’ll vouch for Martin — they’re there. For whatever the price of this book is, you get 55 hikes in 217 pages; it costs you no gasoline, no effort, and you don’t even have to pack a lunch. You could go on a hike in Central Colorado while watching the Broncos lose from the comfort of your own sofa. By all means, you should buy this book.
Thankfully, the author saw the pitiful Sangre de Cristo mountains for what they are and excluded them. For those who don’t already know, the Sangres are ugly little heaps of desert spoil near Pueblo — not even on the outskirts of Central Colorado. They should at all costs be avoided by hikers because the trails there all such and lead to nowhere.
That leaves us with the Colorado Cycling Guide by Jean and Hartley Alley. I like this book because it doesn’t send any of the Lycra lemmings likely to read it off a paved road. Better yet, some of the tours involving Central Colorado just pass through; one tour has the cyclist starting in one sacrifice zone, Vail, passing through Leadville, and then completing the ride in another sacrifice zone, Aspen. Hooray!
All in all, it’s a pretty good deal, with an opening chapter covering weather, technique, fitness, equipment, safety, and rules of the road, among other things. The book then progresses into a nuts-and-bolts description of each tour with details like mileage, elevation gain, shoulder widths, terrain, a blow-by-blow description measured out to the tenth of a mile, camping spots, stores and descriptions of towns along the way. I wonder why the publisher didn’t broaden the market for this book and call it Colorado Cycling and Hitch-Hiking Guide.
Once while riding the Hardscrabble Circle, which rolls along the Arkansas River for a good while and is one of the routes listed in this book, I heard honking over the roar of the river. As the book notes, the shoulder is only two feet wide in places along this stretch and I just knew it was a big hay-hauling semi bearing down on me from behind. With heavy traffic in the oncoming lane, I would be squashed like a bug. I dismounted, lifted my new Trek 1200 to my chest, and flattened myself with my back against the rock wall on the right.
It was a train on the other side of the river that I was hearing. But the people driving in the westbound lane were truly amused.
I haven’t ridden that route since. But if you like to ride your bike and take chances with motor vehicles — and assuming you lack an imagination and have never driven a car over the four major highways of Central Colorado — this could be a book you’ll like at $16.95 for 33 tours in 377 pages. Otherwise it’s best left on the shelf for the Spandex crowd from the Front Strange and beyond, those silly types with beer coolers on their heads who like to wave you down and ask questions like, “This road go all the way to Leadville?”
— Hal Walter