CALIFORNIA HIKING: The Complete Guide (Foghorn Outdoors: California Hiking)

Featuring more than 350 hikes within 90 minutes driving time of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and 650 more throughout the state, this hiker's bible covers areas from Desolation Wilderness to the Trinity Alps, from Plumas National Forest to the East Mojave Desert. Indexed and cross-referenced, hikes are rated for beauty, degree of solitude, difficulty, time, and length. 60 maps.

There are few corners of California in which Tom Stienstra has not set Vibram-soled foot at one time or another.

In this information-packed guidebook, the longtime San Francisco Chronicle outdoors columnist catalogues the best (and the rest) of the Golden State's trails, combining his encyclopedic knowledge with that of another accomplished trekker, Ann Marie Brown. The two cover more than a thousand hikes that range from short jaunts to multiday expeditions, rating each walk for length and difficulty and providing notes on water sources, points of interest, permits, contacts, and other useful data. At the most demanding end of the scale, for example, is a 14-mile scramble up Mount Shasta, for which they recommend that you carry an ice ax and crampons; on the moderate side is the 10.6-mile ramble through Pine Valley, in the coastal mountains above Big Sur, with "an up-and-down course that soon becomes more down than up"; and on the easy end is a 1.2-mile round-trip amble along the Desert View Nature Trail near the summit of Southern California's Laguna Mountain. In every instance, Stienstra and Brown tell what you can expect to see and where you're likely to encounter trouble in the form of storms, predatory mammals, or crowds.

Thoroughly updated, this is by far the best single source of information on planning a hiking trip in California. --Gregory McNamee