Squamish’s well-known author of seven rock climbing guidebooks, Marc Bourdon, has turned his attention for the first time to hiking, with a comprehensive new guidebook for hikers of almost all ages and abilities.
In Squamish Hiking, Bourdon features 82 trails from Horseshoe Bay to the Callaghan Valley. Each trail is given a difficulty rating and the time it takes to complete, along with other technical information such as elevation.
Bourdon also includes driving instructions, parking constraints and interesting facts about each route or area.
There’s a surprisingly large amount of information in the softcover’s 352 pages, including best hikes with children, species of wildflowers, flora and fauna and how to hike safely.
It is the most comprehensive and well-researched local hiking guidebook available to date, he said.
Bourdon told The Chief it took three years for him to complete the book.
He hiked every trail within its pages.
“I am pretty systematic in how I research stuff,” he said, adding he first made a database of all the local trails. “Then I just systematically started to hike them all.”
He completed the bulk of the hiking in about 18 months, going out a couple of times a week from March to late October.
“It was a very nice process because I did a lot of them with my family,” he said of his wife and young daughter.
Even experienced local hikers will find something they didn’t know in the book’s pages.
For the more advanced or long hikes that would have over-taxed his daughter, Bourdon headed out solo.
“I am an introvert and I enjoy the alone time, especially out in the mountains,” he said. “I did about 30 or 40 per cent of them by myself.”
The book is the perfect size to slip in the backpack so hikers can refer to it on route.
And unlike many modern guidebooks, it isn’t full of distracting advertising. The front and the back pages feature local companies, but inside is all about the hiking.
Squamish Hiking, published by Quickdraw Publications, can be found at www.quickdrawpublications.com.
