Pros and cons of standard maps when day hiking with children

Depend on topographical rather than standard road maps and their kin
when navigating a hiking trail. Photo courtesy of ulrikkold / Photoree.

Standard road maps (including printed guides and handmade trail maps) show highways and locations of cities and parks. Maps included in guidebooks, printed guides handed out at parks, and that are hand drawn tend to be designed like road maps, and often carry the same positives and negatives.

The main advantage of a standard road map is that it eliminates all of the extraneous info you’ll find on other maps, focusing on a key landmark feature, specifically roads. Because of this, a road map is mainly useful for helping you figure out how to reach the trailhead, and in the case of printed guides, pointing out highlights you can see on the trail.

The benefits end there, though. Standard road maps rarely show trails or forest roads that you might traverse. In addition, they don’t give you a sense of the lay of the land, such as how high hills and mountains are. If hand drawn, as are many of those on printed guides, they are not always done to scale, making any estimate of how far you’ve got to go difficult if not impossible.

Read more about day hiking with children in my Hikes with Tykes guidebooks.

Why camping isn't covered in 'Hikes with Tykes'

Q: Why isn’t camping covered in your book? – trekgirl87

A: For many, hiking is an extension of camping – that is, it’s something to do between nights of sleeping in a tent. As the scope of this book is limited to day hiking, in which you leave home after the sun has come up and return home before the sun goes down, I deliberately left out camping. Be forewarned that camping involves a whole range of gear, such as tents, sleeping bags, sleeping mats, stoves, utensils, lanterns and more. It’ll require much heavier loads to carry, or you might simply drive a vehicle full of the gear up to your campsite. You’ll also probably have to pay for a campsite permit. I’d recommend consulting guidebooks about camping to find out about what camping gear is best for children and other particulars of that pastime.

Read more about day hiking with children in my guidebook Hikes with Tykes.

Guidebooks: Great sources but not enough

Guidebook trail maps usually lack enough detail to be
of use on the trail. They also can be out of date.

Guidebooks are great sources of information for planning a day hike with kids. They provide a list of potential trails and usually all kinds of relevant information, such as trail lengths, sights to see along the way, and even maps.

Be forewarned, though: trails and conditions may have changed since the guidebook was published, so you don’t want to rely solely on one book for information to plan your hike. Always check online and other guidebooks to see if there’s any updated information or additional descriptions to help you become even more familiar with the trail. You’ll also almost always want to gather better maps than what a guidebook provides.

Some hikers find the information in them useful when out on the trail. While you might take kid-friendly field guides to help identify plants and animals, guidebooks about trails usually are bulky, and the first moment they get wet the pages turn moldy and curl out of shape. A guidebook is best left at home, if only to reduce the load you carry.

Bethany O., of Hood River, Ore., suggests, “If there’s information you need from a guide-book about a specific location, type it as notes and carry it with your paper maps. I usually do this for directions to the trailhead and location of key turns and landmarks to help me along the way.”

Read more about hiking navigation in my guidebook Hikes with Tykes.