City Walks Deck: Chicago: 50 Adventures On Foot Book

This is a really sucky hiking guide. I don't think I realized when I picked it up two years ago that it said it had a THOUSAND hikes in it. You know what they say about things being broad but not deep? That's this guide. The handful of hikes I've pulled from here have been poorly described, have been WAY harder than described (there's one on the I-90 corridor that we now describe as the "sucker-punch hike" because we must have climbed 4500' in 4 miles), the descriptions are super short, the elevation gains are not always included, the driving directions are sometimes incomplete. My sister and I got three miles into one hike earlier this year only to realize that we'd started at the WRONG trailhead because the mileage in the guide was wrong, and the signage at the trailhead was bad. Hah.

Still, this book is good for getting a broad overview of the hikes available in a region, but I won't rely on it for an in-depth look at what to expect on a trail. Yeeesh.