Does anyone besides Seabury Blair's friends like this book? Marlene Kocur liked it but she has also drew the maps for the book. Another reader gave it 5 stars but also happens to live on the Olympic Peninsula. Probably another of Mr. Blair's friends. If you give this horrendous book a positive review please be completely honest about whether or not the author happens to be a friend of yours. Blair has written a pamphlet for beginning cross-country skiers and then stretched it into a book by printing the same route descriptions over and over again. Then he slapped a cover on it to try and sell it to backcountry skiers and snowboarders. A quick perusal at the bookstand would make this obvious but on the web we don't have that luxury.

The best thing about this guide is that you can use it all winter and put it away in the summer. I really like the relaxed style and the way the author makes me feel like I can do any one of these routes in a day.
I own both backcountry skiing and snowboarding guides to Washington, and this one is by far the best. Most of the routes in the other book are only open in the summer and it would be impossible to get to them in a day.

Seabury Blair's guide book appeals to those of us who don't jump off of cliffs for entertainment. When first starting out as a novice skier I would have appreciated having a copy of this book. Now that I'm skiing at an intermediate level this guide book is invaluable. It's formatted for all levels of skiing abilities. Most guide books are written with just the facts..very dry. Blair's guide book is informative but written with a sense of humor. Whether you are experienced or just beginning to take to the snow this book is for you. Very well done.

You cannot plan a trip on any of the off-trail routes based upon the information in this book. It has lots of nice information about plants and large stands of old growth forest. This is a nice touch which many guidebooks simply overlook. Most of the offtrail routes have little more than a couple of sentences. This is not a Beckey Guide by nay means.

The Mid fork is a splendid, wild, wooly, and undocumented place; for anybody interested in exploring it, this is an very useful resource. Carl Dreisbach knows the Mid Fork well and writes about it in an engaging, literate style. I have consulted it often as a source of ideas and guide to possiblities for trail and off-trail travel.

One thing to be aware of: many of his off-trail scrambling routes are really climber's routes. Using any guide book requires some "calibration"; it's hard to compare this book to, say those spring bros "100 hikes" books because the philosophy is so different. As far as I'm concerned, the "100 hikes" books greatly overestimate the time and difficulty of anything and everything, and Dreisbach conversely underrepresents the time and difficulty of anything and everything. For the climb-literate, his ratings of technical difficulty are generally lower than what Fred Beckey would assign; to me a Fred Beckey third class means I don't need a rope, though I might be a bit scared from time to time; a Dreisbach mention of "third class" means, probably should have a rope along and might want to use it.

Another caveat: his little schematic maps are inadequate used alone and should be used only in company with a good topo map, preferably the 1:24000 7-1/2 minute maps. Regarding ascent routes, Dresibach's described routes are often interesting, but generally not the easiest way up.

For the trail-inclined, I would say this is still a useful book, because there are quite a few unmarked and informal trails in the Mid Fork that you can learn about otherwise only by, say, trying to get to Marten lake and discovering an unmarked trail on your intended bushwack route.

This is a really great book for hikers and adventures. A must have! Get it you won't regret it!

My criticism of this guide applies to all of the so-called "classic" hikes series. It is difficult for me to write, because Harvey Manning was once one of the best guidebook writers on the planet, and Ira Spring's photos are awesome.
But that was then, and this is now. The books are poorly edited, inaccurately updated, sloppy attempts to sell a few more great color pictures and once-good-but-now-preachy Manning writing.
Anyone who has been on any one of the trails of this guide should be able to find at least one significant innacuracy in the description, largely because I'll bet the authors haven't hiked on some ot the trails since they wrote the first edition, almost a half-century ago.
Sadly, some of the photos in this book are in error, too - such as the photo of the "marsh marigold" on page 234, which is actually a Western anemone; or the photo of the "avalanche lily" on page 198, actually a glacier lily. Worse still is the picture on page 35, which shows campers tending a fire in an area where fires have been banned for the past 20 years.
In sum, the classic series does little to enhance the fine reputations of these two guidebook authors.

Authors Spring and Manning would have done much better serving their readers with more about hikes in Washington and less with their ad nauseum opinions on the Forest Service.

So far I have only done four hikes in this book, but I intend to try them all! The colorful pictures are a nice incentive to hike that long distance. From a one and a half mile hike to a 500 mile hike, this book will accomodate any level hiker and any time limits they may have. This book gives directions as well as how many miles the hike is and the elevation you will be gaining. It provides estimated time allotments and phone nubers to call to reserve camp sites and see if trails are open. Best of all there are hikes from the Pacific Ocean to the Cascades. This book is must have for hikers in the great state of Washington!

Whether it's your schedule or your body that prevents you from doing long hikes, this is a good resource for southern Washington's Cascades. Has all the usual statistics you've come to expect in a Spring-format guidebook.

CASCADE by T. J. Fox presents the first of the Justine Edwards novels. Blending suspense, mystery and a light dose of romance, CASCADE provides the perfect quick read for readers who seek strong female characters with flair.

Too attractive to be taken seriously, Justine desperately determines that she will prove herself on this, the first assignment that takes her beyond the routine, minor cases that always reach her desk. Her partner, Blake Hampton, assigned to be her external contact, knows the real reason, which he is not allowed to divulge, why she was selected for the case. Although he tries to discourage her from accepting, Justine wants this opportunity and will not be deterred. Working undercover, Justine plunges into a world of luxury, drugs, pornography and grisly murder. Unknowingly, she exactly resembles the suspected killer's last victim.

Shadowed by her handsome superior in the Bureau, Justine soon finds herself in a maze of murder, incest, fear and suspicion. Justine increasingly finds it difficult to know that the pleasant and charming Preston Montgomery is a brutal murderer. However, when the safety net is cut, Justine finds herself in the escalating danger, and in the control of a murderous psychopath. The varied and horrible happenings, and unsettling discoveries, keep the suspense at peak level.

While Fox's writing style at time falls victim to too much telling, not enough showing, the intense plot overrides any deficiencies. A powerful storyteller, Fox creates a novel of tension and murder that will keep the pages turning.

This book helped me out a lot in terms of finding areas to ski in when I first moved to Washington from Montana. However, some of the dialogue disturbed me, as I am a cross-country skier who also works for an organization that fights for the elimination of catastrophically damaging logging techniques. One quote is as follows: "In the rosy glow of the 1980s, it seemed that the overcutting of timber on forest lands was, if anything, a boon to the cross-country skier: more forest roads to explore in the winter, more clearcuts for downhill runs, and easier access to high meadows." At one point, it even described clearcuts to be "picturesque." I see clearcuts as the rape of the land, and because I learned how to cross country ski on narrow trails used for hiking in the summer rather than forest service roads, many of the descriptions turn me off to areas rather than draw me in. Where can I ski in a truly wild area, enclosed by frosted trees?

The primary accomplishment of this book is its 500+ page discussion of the Washington Cascades without mention of The Mountaineers club! The first 140 pages deal with indians, immigrant trails and the Hudson's Bay Company. Nothing new here, a lot of references to Winthrop's Canoe and Saddle and a discription of Ross' trip over Cascade Pass. The next seventy pages are about the first boundry survey fron 1857 - 1862. This is the guts of the book and it is really good - vintage Beckey. It's researched from original sources and well footnoted. The next sixty or seventy pages are basically about the railroads. These stories have been told before in more detai but the recounting is interesting with an attention to the geography that is usually overlooked. (Yakima Pass?) The third part of the book is a superficial presentation of mining in the Northwest, early mountaineering on the volcanoes and the beginnings of the forest service. None of these are done particularly well and none of them have enough detail to complement the first part of the book. This section does have a thirty page section on the USGS topographers and the second boundry survey in 1901 - 1908. It was during this era that many of the first ascents in the cascades were done but the discussion is brief and clearly omits the majority of what Beckey wrote about these efforts in the CAG series. Overall I have to say that I was disappointed. I understand that the Oregon Historical Society lacked the funds to publish and held it up for a long time but I started hearing about this book in the early '90s and saw a mock-up of it's cover at their booth at bookfest in about 1995. I got very excited reading the first part of the book but ended up feeling like Fred got tired about halfway through, or that he lost interest and just glossed over everything after the boundry survey. Read Woodhouse about mining. Read Molenar and Haines or Rusk on mountaineering. Read Beckey's own Challenge of the North Cascades and the introductions and footnotes in the Cascade Alpine Guide series. Read Bates Three Fingers to get a flavor of the early forest service era - and there are probably better sources for people interested in that topic (Even Beckey's CAG intros and notes have more information that this book does.) Read Tabor & Crowder Routes and Rocks about the geology. Read Roe and Praether about the railroads (again, also covered in CAG). Read Miles Kolma Kulshan about Mt. Baker. Finally, read Carlos Schwantes. His railroad discussion and his regional history are a lot better than Beckey's. But read Beckey about the boundry survey. There's nothing else like it.