Falcon Guides

In preparation for our summer day hiking family trip plan, I've been reading some Falcon Guides hiking guides for the Wyoming area in particular.  I've had mixed results with these books.  While their information on the trails is generally pretty good--the main reason you'd want to read them, I suppose--the baggage that they come with is considerably less desireable.  By this I mean the implicit and ubiquitous socio-political undertone that infuses these books.

I suspect, however, that the reason that they do is because hiking culture is, in generally, a fairly hippy-like culture.  It's going to be in stark contrast to a place like Wyoming itself, but it's rampant amongst the kinds of people who likely are the majority audience for books like the Falcon Guides.  You can see a lot of this too when you go to a place like REI, which is backpacking central.  A friend of mine made the somewhat tongue-in-cheek (yet mostly true) comment that REI is where the hippies go to shop for their outdoor stuff, and Cabela's is where the rednecks go.  I'm in the somewhat uncomfortable position of having much more in common in almost every respect with the rednecks of Cabela's than with the hippies of REI... and yet what I want to do outside is hike, not hunt or fish.

Realisitically, you can get most of what you want at Cabela's instead of REI if you wish to (and I do) but there will always be a few things that Cabela's doesn't stock because it really only applies to hikers, and that's not their focus. 

Anyway, here's a few pictures, all of them from summitpost.org.  Three of them are from the Greater Yellowstone area, and the fourth is from Glacier National Park.