Jeru Falls Fail. That Dratted Book.
May. 19th, 2021 03:56 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
canyonwalkerInland Empire Travelog #10
North of Sand Point, Idaho - Sat, 15 May 2021. 4:30pm.
Today was supposed to be an epic waterfall hiking day. We'd take five hikes to waterfalls. Alas, it has been a day of hits and misses because the guidebook we used to plan this trip is full of inaccuracies.
I wrote years ago about the book we call Dr. Smedley Q. Boredom's Very Dull Book of Waterfalls. Technically it's Waterfall Lover's Guide Pacific Northwest by Gregory Plumb.
We give it our own (un)loving pet name because it's, frankly, very dull. And now we've found it's also frustratingly inaccurate. Three things:
1) The author is a college professor who writes in a passive and occasionally stilted style that embodies some of the worst stereotypes of academic prose.
2) The author focuses more on hydrology than hiking. It's like the book was written primarily to document the existence of waterfalls and rate them by their flow as measured in cubic feet per minute. (Yes, the book actually lists cfm ranges for each falls.) Descriptions of their scenic value are sparse, as are details about the hiking trails to get to some of them.
3) As we've been finding out on this trip especially, the book is full of inaccuracies. Driving routes to the waterfalls or their hiking trails have streets misnamed, are missing turns, and/or have distances wrong by miles. Moreover, once we've gotten to several of the supposed trailheads we've found that they're on private property with fences, locked gates, and copious "No Trespassing" signs. Some of the places have been closed up so long that any evidence there may once have been a hiking trail there is gone.
I'm writing this now after expressing my frustration about the book in several recent blog entries because we've just had another hiking fail. The directions for Jeru Falls were off by a few miles, and when we did finally find Jeru Creek it was clearly on private property. We're running about 50/50 this whole trip for waterfalls listed in this book.
I think I find this especially frustrating because we have a love-hate relationship with the book. We love it because it lists so many waterfalls, including smaller and more remote ones that other guidebooks skip over. But we hate it because it has let us down with inaccuracies so many times.
"Why not use the book as a starting point for your own research?" you might ask. Indeed, we already do that. We use the book to identify places we'd like to go, then cross reference its directions against things like Google Maps and web searches for online hiking sites. It's only by doing this that we haven't suffered more fails this trip! Plus, among the search results we found a companion website for the book. Its vintage, MySpace-like web design is a laugh!
North of Sand Point, Idaho - Sat, 15 May 2021. 4:30pm.
Today was supposed to be an epic waterfall hiking day. We'd take five hikes to waterfalls. Alas, it has been a day of hits and misses because the guidebook we used to plan this trip is full of inaccuracies.
I wrote years ago about the book we call Dr. Smedley Q. Boredom's Very Dull Book of Waterfalls. Technically it's Waterfall Lover's Guide Pacific Northwest by Gregory Plumb.
We give it our own (un)loving pet name because it's, frankly, very dull. And now we've found it's also frustratingly inaccurate. Three things:1) The author is a college professor who writes in a passive and occasionally stilted style that embodies some of the worst stereotypes of academic prose.
2) The author focuses more on hydrology than hiking. It's like the book was written primarily to document the existence of waterfalls and rate them by their flow as measured in cubic feet per minute. (Yes, the book actually lists cfm ranges for each falls.) Descriptions of their scenic value are sparse, as are details about the hiking trails to get to some of them.
3) As we've been finding out on this trip especially, the book is full of inaccuracies. Driving routes to the waterfalls or their hiking trails have streets misnamed, are missing turns, and/or have distances wrong by miles. Moreover, once we've gotten to several of the supposed trailheads we've found that they're on private property with fences, locked gates, and copious "No Trespassing" signs. Some of the places have been closed up so long that any evidence there may once have been a hiking trail there is gone.
I'm writing this now after expressing my frustration about the book in several recent blog entries because we've just had another hiking fail. The directions for Jeru Falls were off by a few miles, and when we did finally find Jeru Creek it was clearly on private property. We're running about 50/50 this whole trip for waterfalls listed in this book.
I think I find this especially frustrating because we have a love-hate relationship with the book. We love it because it lists so many waterfalls, including smaller and more remote ones that other guidebooks skip over. But we hate it because it has let us down with inaccuracies so many times.
"Why not use the book as a starting point for your own research?" you might ask. Indeed, we already do that. We use the book to identify places we'd like to go, then cross reference its directions against things like Google Maps and web searches for online hiking sites. It's only by doing this that we haven't suffered more fails this trip! Plus, among the search results we found a companion website for the book. Its vintage, MySpace-like web design is a laugh!
