Canadian Rockies Trail Guide

by Brian Patton, Bart Robinson

With sales of over 230,000 copies, the Canadian Rockies Trail Guide is one of best-selling non fiction books in Canadian publishing history. Hikers affectionately refer to this hiking guidebook as the Bible. When it was published in 1971, it was the first book with accurate distances and detailed descriptions to the trails of the Canadian Rockies. The 8th edition covers more than 3,400 kilometres of trails in Banff, Jasper, Yoho, Kootenay and Waterton Lakes National Parks, plus the provincial parks of Mt. Assinboine, Mt. Robson, Akamina-Kishinena, Peter Lougheed, and Elk Lakes.

Genres: Travel, Outdoors, Nonfiction, Reference

Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

Reviews

[Kristy Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is quite the comprehensive guide to hiking in the Canadian Rockies and includes far more area than I was able to cover in the 10 day vacation that I spent there. The only reason I didn't give it 5 stars is because a few of the hikes were a little confusing on the distances because of the optional side trips (a 9 mile loop ended up being 13 miles after a side excursion, and I'm glad we didn't do the other side excursion because we would have missed a spectacular avalanche at the Victoria Glacier) and because we got lost a couple of times looking for trailheads. It's quite descriptive but things (and signage) do change. I have the 2017 publication. This in combination with the Hiking with Barry blog (I found some of his combination hikes to have more accurate milage/km) were great tools for our 10 days of exploration.

My husband and I stayed at the Fairmont Chateau in Lake Louise and either took shuttles or drove out to different regions from there each day for hiking and viewing wildlife/flowers. Definitely recommend taking a guided ice walk at the Athabasca Glacier. If you plan on driving the Icefields Parkway, I also recommend his ebook Icefields Parkway Driving Guide as there is great background and information on stops that are not marked on the road including a great waterfall that is down a trail hidden off a scenic viewpoint. We saw dozens of people stop there for the view but we only saw one other couple (who admitted they were locals) on the trail to the waterfall simply because the trail is unmarked and no-one knew it was there.

[Pablo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nicely written, great recommendations and good hikes. This book is essential if you are visiting Banff, Lake Louise, or Jasper. It is sad that some really good trails in Canmore are not covered. Good pictures and highlights. It made hiking easier in the rockies! If you have a short limited amount of time on the rockies, this book is a good place to pick which hikes to do.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Canadian classic and my introduction to hiking . We have used it for 30 plus years (probably time for an updated edition). Authors manage to cram a lot of detail into a compact volume. My favourite line remains "The hiker will pay dearly for the view." We did but it was worth it

[Markus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I would have rated this book higher had I not already read the book on Isle Royale National Park (USA) by Jim Dufresne. To be fair, Isle Royale is a much smaller park, and is only one, while Brian Patton covers the ENTIRE Canadian Rockies. I found myself wishing that Patton would have gone into greater detail. It felt like he was trying to cover too much information in one book. There were a few occasions where he mentioned a "more popular" trail combination, but did not list that as a single trail, leaving me to piece it together from multiple pages. I wish that Patton would have used his knowledge and experience to go further in depth, possibly causing the book to be broken up into a few volumes to cover the entire Canadian Rockies.

With my grievances aside, this book is well done, and a must for anyone going into the Canadian Rockies for day hiking or backpacking.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Apparently, not too many hiking books on the Canadian Rockies. Good popular hikes listed here with quite a bit of detail.