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A trip to Yellowstone can be optimized in both time and money with some planning before your trip. This means that chances are you'll need to buy a book and/or map to complement all the free literature out there to aid in your trip planning and navigation to the National Park. Below are books and maps that we've used. We've also included other books in the literature that may help you find what you need. The list is by no means complete, but hopefully it is enough to get you going on your quest to inform yourself on your travels.
Books
Yellowstone Treasures (Granite Peak Publications): This popular guidebook is like a personal tour guide through the most common and accessible attractions in the park. Author Janet Chapple has a pretty extensive family history in the park and she covers the park in a user-friendly manner. I also like the extra tidbits about the park from its geology to wildlife to history. The information is presented based on sights you'll see as you drive through the Grand Loop road so it's great as a travel companion especially if you have a passenger with the book helping to navigate for the driver. The use of color in maps and photographs also help make this a pleasant book to look at as well as use. Definitely recommended.
Photographer's Guide to Yellowstone & The Tetons (Stackpole Books): This guide breaks down how to take the best photographs of some of the park's most famous attractions and most popular subjects. I've found this book pretty useful when photographing the Tetons and even how best to photograph geysers (after all, if you're waiting for one to go off, you'd want to capture it the best way you can, right?). Definitely a good resource to have if you want to take meaningful photos and I can easily see why it's popular.
Yellowstone Waterfalls and Their Discovery (Westcliffe Publishers): This book by Paul Rubinstein, Lee H. Whittlesey, and Mike Stevens is a pretty comprehensive collection of the park's waterfalls - most of which are practically inaccessible to most park visitors. With full color photographs and thoughtful organization, it's a pretty high quality book. My big gripe with it is that the author's have intentionally left out meaningful directions to the falls. While I can see the wisdom in leaving wild places wild, I do have a problem with the elitist insinuation that only certain people can enjoy some of the park's best features as they indulge in how the falls were discovered. Why have a guidebook, then? Anyways, we frequently consult this book, but you have to be especially mindful of some of the excursions as they're downright dangerous (e.g. Terraced Falls' photo is misleading and trying to find a way to achieve the author's result is downright dangerous).
Waterfalls of Yellowstone National Park (Panther Press): This pocket-sized guidebook is packed with reasonable waterfall excursions. Author Charles Maynard gives adequate descriptions and photos are placed where possible. However, the condensed topo maps photocopied into the layout of the book are not readable and you pretty much need to carry around your own paper Topo! maps with you anyways. Definitely more useful as a guidebook than the above-mentioned Yellowstone Waterfalls and Their Discovery.
Waterfalls of Grand Teton National Park (Panther Press): Similar to the one for Yellowstone, this is another pocket-sized book by Charles Maynard, but this is focused solely on Grand Teton National Park. There aren't really a whole lot of notable waterfalls in this park so I think it's kind of a stretch to make a whole book dedicated to this park instead of combining it with the Yellowstone book. It still has the same shortcomings regarding maps (you'll want to carry your own Topo! map to complement this book).
Yellowstone Trails (Yellowstone Association): This is a no-nonsense, black-and-white old school hiking guide of the park by Mark C. Marschall. I bought it based on a recommendation by a Yellowstone old-timer and I think there was a bit of a generation gap between what I was looking for versus the tried-and-true notions of a long-time hiker in the park. The book covers the trails with an emphasis on flora and fauna you'll see as well as tips on how to stay safe in the backcountry. Most of the hikes described here will require a good deal of self-reliance in bear country. But in terms of what most day hikers and park visitors are looking for, they'll probably want something more modern.
Hiking Yellowstone National Park (Falcon Guide): Falcon Guides are hiking books really geared towards hikers wishing to do stuff beyond the typical auto-touring attractions. They have pretty decent maps and a good milestone summary of most of their hikes along with elevation profiles and GPS coordinates (in some cases). It's all in black and white though there was a short insert with color photographs, but all in all this book is pretty solid. Along with the other information learned from our pre-trip research, it was a good complementary source as well as trail companion on the few longer hikes we did.
Scenic Driving Yellowstone and Grand Teton National Parks (Falcon Guide): Although most Falcon Guides are geared towards hiking, this one takes the tried-and-true format and makes it into more of a road guide. Since Yellowstone Treasures did a great enough job at the road guide task, this book was really more of a complementary source. However, they did cover sections outside of the park as well as Grand Teton NP, which were beyond the scope of the Chapple book.
Hiking Grand Teton National Park (Falcon Guide): Falcon Guides are hiking books really geared towards hikers wishing to do stuff beyond the typical auto-touring attractions. They have pretty decent maps and a good milestone summary of most of their hikes along with elevation profiles and GPS coordinates (in some cases). It's all in black and white though they're generally pretty solid in content. In the case of Grand Teton NP, we bought the book after the trip and we only did part of the Cascade Canyon hike so we really can't say much about the quality of info outside of this one chapter.
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Maps
Topo! Wyoming (National Geographic): The National Geographic Topo! series are no-nonsense raster-based topographic maps at an incredible 1:24k scale (i.e. you can see walking trails, campsites, bathrooms, and other specific buildings) for the entire state. The one we got for Wyoming was a little bit outdated as the roads didn't really line up (in some cases were completely off) with the GPS tracks from our trip logging. So I'd have to say our experience with it wasn't that great, but I'm sure a more up-to-date one would cure those problems. But I still have a major gripe with the Topo! series' poor interface. You actually need to purchase supplemental patches to get added functionality including the ever-so-important live GPS navigation. In all honesty, I think Topo! maps are excellent for hiking and backpacking, but they're terrible for road navigation or even trip logging.
Topo! Idaho (National Geographic): Pretty similar to the Wyoming map except it's for the neighboring state of Idaho. We purchased this map so our waypoints and tracks captured while driving the Mesa Falls Scenic Byway could be recorded. It also has some detail about the west entrance to the Bechler Backcountry, which would be useful if we were to come from the Ashton Idaho side.
Trails Illustrated Yellowstone National Park (National Geographic): We've made extensive use of this paper map, especially when out on the trail. Trails Illustrated is usually pretty rock solid with their 1:24k scale and pretty durable material. It was especially important for our needs considering how outdated our CDROM of Wyoming was.
Trails Illustrated Grand Teton National Park (National Geographic): Unlike the Yellowstone paper map, we didn't utilize this one as much since most of the Tetons are easily visited by just following the signs. However, if you're backcountry hiking beyond the lakes and into the rugged ranges, then you'll need to be using this map. But since we didn't make it very far into Cascade Canyon (the only hiking we did in the Tetons), we didn't really need to use this map too much except for armchair traveling into the backcountry imagining what it must be like...
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