While there are several river guides available for Alaska and elsewhere, a guidebook that mixes boating and hiking is rare (there’s a Fairbanks book by Kyle Joly, Outside in the Interior, that mentions a couple packrafting trips),
However, I have been collecting material for one.
An example of content and formating is posted here http://packrafting.blogspot.com/ with a couple of sample trips.
Comments on the content, format, and general idea from this forum would be most welcome.
While there are several river guides available for Alaska and elsewhere, a guidebook that mixes boating and hiking is rare (there’s a Fairbanks book by Kyle Joly, Outside in the Interior, that mentions a couple packrafting trips),
However, I have been collecting material for one.
An example of content and formating is posted here > http://packrafting.blogspot.com/ > with a couple of sample trips.
Comments on the content, format, and general idea from this forum would be most welcome.
I’ve been reading your reports from your trip last year, and hoping that you’d put something like this together for many of those trips as well. I’m sure that an Alaska guide is likely to get more regular use, but your writing is good enough to make a worldwide guide interesting reading even for those of us who will do more daydreaming than actual running of foreign rivers. If you are interested in writing a guide like that, in addition to the information you include for your sample descriptions of McCarthy’s Forest and Honolulu Hoop, I know I would benefit from information on logistics of getting too/from the trip, etc.
Not to be the bad guy, but doesn’t that really take away from the whole point? Sure I guess some people are lazy and don’t want to go through figuring out all the logistics and would buy a guidebook. Myself and I’m sure many others would rather figure it out on our own. This is especially true regarding what I would call the play by play. I’m familiar with how to read water and know how and when I need to scout a rapid, the last thing I want to read is someones most likely confusing and likely not that accurate description of each rapid. Guidebooks do no one a service in terms of adventure. Mostly they take the adventure out of it. Then again if it’s the weekend warrior crowd, which is likely the fastest growing facet of packrafting, maybe it’s a necessary evil.
I would have to disagree. I find basic information about what to expect on a particular river, what conditions are like at various flows, where the major rapids are located - how to run them, where to scout them - to be essential confidence-boosting information, especially as a relative newcomer to the world of packrafting. Guidebooks to hiking trips alone are pretty well superfluous compared to the potentially life-saving info a good river guide can provide, even summarily. A guide to round-trip packrafting destinations, as a concept, would offer the prospect of getting more out of the sport with less off-putting speculation.
That said, I would imagine such a guidebook, through the unavoidable need to be really selective editorially, and the author’s more elite focus, might read more like a coffee table book for the majority of us. Lots of intimate photographs, we hope! And perhaps a few sub-PR4 trips thrown in for good measure?
In the future, perhaps a series of regional packrafting-hiking guidebooks, co-authored, could be less abashed about including easier trips in sub-wilderness environments, with an eye toward greater popular recruitment into the sport.
Which is the evil? A book aimed at more casual users or the more casual users themselves (such as myself)? The way I see it, the more people involved in packrafting the better. People who use a river are more likely to care about it and to want preserve it.
Yes, I’d tend to agree. As I see it, if you want to run rivers that are easy to get to, then it’s likely there will be repeated knowledge about the river in some form (e.g. a guidebook, or a webpage, or common knowledge). If you want to be out there on your own, you’ll have to put some more effort into doing something more original.