National Geographic Yosemite National Park Road Guide (Direct Mail Edition): Road Maps with Side-by-Side Commentary; Orientation Maps and Keys; ... Side Trips (National Geographic Road Guides) Paperback – April 18, 2006

Great map if your driving

On planning our trip here I bought this thinking it had more details. It is simply a road guide with little information of use. I will order one of the Fodor Compass guides for much more details. The roads and very general sites are shown using topo maps which are nice. For me it's not worthwhile but I'll take it anyway for very general information. There are way better guides.

For any first time visitor or returning visitor to Yosemite Park, this is an invalualbe tool! It is so easy to use, so handy, and so logically laid out. It is always sold out at Borders in the SF Bay area; so be sure to order yours a month ahead of time beucase this will be the tool that will reward you with a great time in a great national park!

One of the great (probably apocryphal) stories about Yosemite concerned some tourists who asked a park ranger what to do if they had only one day in the parks. The ranger responded, "If I had only one day in Yosemite, I might sit down and cry." Unfortunately, schedules being what they are, many people only have a day or two to spend in Yosemite. As a result, they need to simply drive through and catch the highlights. If you fall into that category, don't cry, but do get this book. It lists some of the main features you will see on all the park roads and describes them in about a paragraph.This book is organized with road maps on the left and route descriptions on the right. This leads to some unusual reading. For example, if driving from Yosemite Valley to Tioga Pass, you will read from the bottom of the right page up. The location notes literally follow the map up the page. The book also contains some nice "Nature Notes" which describe some of the more interesting plant and animal life along the roads. Careful readers will learn, for example, about the Pygmy Owl that routinely attacks rodents larger than itself and is occasionally carried along for quite a distance before it (sometimes) gets its meal. Finally, the book also contains wonderful panorama shots in black and white of various overlooks within Yosemite and identifies the main features of the view.Although this book does what it sets out to do reasonably well, it has some problems. The maps for Yosemite Valley number the stops on the proposed auto tour, but the facing descriptions do not include the numbers. Other routes through the park (Tioga Pass, Glacier Point, Big Oak Flats Road, etc) either do not have the numbers or use them inconsistently. But the main concern is that this book is insufficient to plan a vacation around, even a short one. I would recommend supplementing this book with Ann Marie Brown's , probably the best survey of lodging, dining and outdoor activities in and around the park. If you want to get out of your car and explore further, you should look to Suzanne Swedo's for short walks. If you have time for longer hikes, check out any of the Yosemite hiking guides by Jeffrey Schaffer. Still, if auto touring is your first or only choice, this is a nice book to enhance your vacation. Get it and have a good time in the best of America's national parks.

I ordered this product as a Christmas gift for my father about a week before Christmas. It did not give me an option to speed up the delivery process, so it came several days after X-mas. Maybe I did not read the description carefully but the book itself was much smaller than expected and the print was very small. I would not recommend this product (although it was cheap).