Who will replace Northwest trail-guide icons Ira Spring and Harvey Manning? It appears that writers Craig Romano and Dan Nelson and photographer Alan Bauer are the heirs apparent.
The next generation of guidebook authors-photographers is responsible for three of the new Day Hiking series by Mountaineers Books: “Day Hiking Snoqualmie Region,” “Day Hiking South Cascades” and “Day Hiking Olympic Peninsula” (Bonnie Henderson has written “Day Hiking Oregon Coast”).
The series replaces guidebooks from Manning and Spring, both having died in recent years. The series eventually will include six area-specific guidebooks for Washington and replace approximately 30 state guidebooks.
“We spent the past four years asking hikers what they wanted in a hiking guidebook, organizing the content into sensible regions for people to explore, adopting the best features from across all types of guidebooks and writing and producing the most compact, accurate, easy-to-use hiking guides ever published for Washington,” said publisher Helen Cherullo.
I can hear hikers kicking up their boot heels.
Over the years we’ve reached the end of one trail or another, ready for a rest and the promised view, only to find trees have grown an additional six feet and blocked an allegedly glorious view, or a clear-cut has destroyed the landscape.
Even icons’ names can be taken in vain.
Manning and Spring created “a marvelous legacy,” Cherullo said, but it became clear that depending on family and friends to keep the books up to date was not going to work in the long term.
“A big concern of ours going into this new series was to make sure the author-photographer teams understood that it wasn’t just writing a book once and walking away from it; that it was a long-term commitment.
“Every time we reprint (every six to 12 months), we always go to the authors and ask what is changed, and they’re given time to update it,” Cerullo said.
New editions, she said, are given another level of scrutiny.
“We’ll review the book but we’d like to take a look and see how to change the book. We have an in-house rule that 20 percent of it needs to be new so that when someone buys a new edition, they’re actually getting some added value,” she said.
Between reprints and editions, Mountaineers Books keeps a file on each book so that when readers write or call with corrections, the authors can include them.
The company and Washington Trails Association developed a partnership; 1 percent of sales from the Day Hiking series will be donated to WTA.
WTA has developed an excellent storm damage map and database in addition to its trail guide, and because it can be updated quickly, is a complement to the books.
“We’ve enjoyed working with WTA. We have the book component and they have the web site component and they’re getting better with time. It was a big motivator with us to work collaboratively with them,” the publisher said.
The Day Hiking series reorganizes the hikes by travel corridors, adds day hikes with options to extend the trip and has more hikes close to urban centers and more year-round hikes at low elevation.
The series includes as many as 125 hikes in each book, each smaller and more portable with improved two-color maps, charts and elevation profiles. Each book has several color photographs in the front, plus sidebars on flora and fauna, historical highlights and endangered wildlife.
Canis lupus: At least one gray wolf has wandered into this state from Idaho, crossing into Pend Oreille County in northeast Washington. A Washington Department of Natural Resources biologist has a photograph of the animal taken from a camera hidden in the trees.
Pronghorns do shed: In last week’s column on antlers and horns, I wrote, “Horns (mountain goats, bighorn sheep) grow continuously and are never shed; antlers (deer, elk, moose, cariboy) are shed and regrown each year.
Naturally there’s an exception, in this case an animal that has its own rule. A pronghorn (also called an antelope and the only member in its family) has a permanent bony core and a keratin sheath. The sheath is shed each year as if it were an antler.
Columnist Sharon Wootton can be reached at 360-468-3964 or www.songandword.com.
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