For a little while now I have been hinting at some books I have had in the works. I have not given too many specifics on what they entail, mostly because I am not the type of person who likes to count their chickens before they hatch. However, after many, many months of work, the books are finally nearing publication and are now available for presale on Amazon. The first book, officially called “Hiking California’s Mount Shasta Region
It has been a long road to getting this book published. In some ways, it began back when I was in graduate school in Dallas. Having spent much of my time out there exploring the Wichita Mountains in Oklahoma, I felt that a good guidebook would have been a useful tool for hikers in that part of the country. At the same time I joined Summitpost.org, a user driven mountaineering website. After lurking for a time, I began contributing content. Many years of writing for that site finally led me to want to do things my own way and to cater specifically to the interests of hikers in the greater Mount Shasta area. I finally launched Hike Mt Shasta two years ago. A lot of the initial content was transferred over from Summitpost, but I soon began developing things solely for Hike Mt Shasta.
Things took a big leap forward in March of 2014, when I was approached by an editor at Falcon Guides. He inquired whether or not I would be interested in converting the website into a printed guidebook. To be perfectly honest, I had wanted to work with Falcon Guides for years. Their style had great appeal to me and it really fit with the way I envisioned a book of my own being done. I even had printed out their book proposal documents and had them sitting on my desk when the editor contacted me. Naturally I jumped at the chance to author the book. At that point the work of transforming the digital site into a print edition began. This continued right up until mid-December, when I finally finished all the necessary elements of the book. It was then sent off to layout and cartography, where the maps and the book itself are all made.
Of course, it did not take me the better part of a year to put together a single book that was, in some respects, already written. There was certainly a lot of work left to do (a lot more than I anticipated!) but it was not enough to cause me to push back all the work until December. Having just been given the opportunity to work with Falcon Guides, I figured I ought to pitch another project to them. I was raised in Sonoma County and grew up hiking and backpacking the trails in that area. It always surprised me that there were so few guide books for such a popular area. I pitched the idea of a guide book for the wine country and they accepted it enthusiastically! Thus began work for “Hiking California’s Wine Country
From April through August, I made monthly trips back down to Sonoma County and began hiking a lot of the trails that I had grown up exploring, as well as a host of fantastic new trails. Needless to say, it was not a bad way to spend the summer. I am not sure exactly how many miles I hiked but it was a lot. It was also a really gratifying experience to rediscover my hometown anew and gain a different and deeper appreciation for how amazing that part of California is. The wine country book contains 75 trails spread around Sonoma, Napa and southern Lake Counties. It has hikes through vineyards, along coastal bluffs, next to beautiful creeks,beneath towering redwoods, deep into vast wild areas and to the summits of tall mountains with amazing views (though none are nearly as tall as Mount Shasta, of course!). Even though IÂ knew and loved the trails in this area, I gained a new appreciation for just how much of a first rate hiking destination the wine country is. Here are a few images that will be in the book, to give an idea of the kinds of places the trails journey through:
Click to enlarge
Both books are going to be released in the next couple of months but they are available for presale on Amazon right now. Some of the details on the Amazon pages like page count, the number of hikes and (hopefully) the release date are inaccurate and will be updated soon. Of course, once the book is in print, some changes will necessarily be made to the Hike Mt Shasta website. What exactly this will entail and how much content will need to be removed remains to be seen. I hope to leave as much beta as possible on the site, but some aspects will have to be altered. Despite this, the blog will continue to be published. For those looking for a Mount Shasta fix or some good discussion of the area’s virtues, there will still be plenty of that on this site.
Thanks to everyone who has read Hike Mt Shasta and been supportive of this effort. I really appreciate it and I sincerely hope that what I have written about the Mount Shasta area has been edifying, helpful and encouraging.
It seems my adventure writing hiking guides is just beginning. The opportunity to write many more books has been presented. Perhaps “Hiking Oklahoma” will be next!
THANKS – love your posts – just pre-ordered 4 books to have here at the McCloud Hotel! Nancy
Wow! Thank you SO much. I really, really appreciate it!
I am soooo excited to see the wine country book!! We have been enjoying the hikes around Sonoma County but we know there is so much more to discover. Congrats to you on 2 books!!! That is an awesome accomplishment! Cheers to many more!
Thanks a lot! It really is amazing how many hidden gems there are in Sonoma County. I hope you continue enjoy exploring the area. Not that I am an expert on the county, but if you ever need to pick a brain on what to do or where to go, I love talking about this stuff and I really appreciate being able to discuss my home town. Thanks again!
Bubba, I was wondering how you were going to monetize your site; it deserved to be. However I have found the web online version to be so much more usable than any guide book I have ever used. Being able to quickly print out one of your maps is a key feature. Will there be a downloadable version of the books? Will the maps still be available online? Being able to click on your index maps to find a hike is great. The ability to add content on an ongoing basis is key; what I consider to be the biggest issue with printed guide books over the years.
I am heading over to Amazon to preorder the book now.
Thanks John. I really appreciate it. I never thought of the book as monetizing the site, but now that you put it that way, I guess it is. Cluttering the site with ads and other distractions never appealed to me, so I just sort of ignored that as a possibility. I had always wanted to get into outdoor writing on a professional level and in the back of my mind I had sort of seen the site as a gateway to that, sort of an online portfolio.
Now that the books are being published and I have the opportunity to do more, I am too attached to HikeMtShasta to let it go or languish unattended. So, to answer your question, I think that there will be a downloadable version. I am still working with my publisher on that. The maps will stay on the site, as will all the images and the basic statistical beta and clickable maps. The blog posts will also stay and continue. I love writing about the Mount Shasta area and I am not about to quit doing that! The biggest change that I anticipate is the removal of the “step by step” descriptions of the trails. Over the course of the summer I plan condensing the descriptions to a single paragraph that just hits the highlights. The directions to trailheads will also remain. At the end of the day, I do want to sell books (thanks for the preorder!), so I don’t want a free alternative readily available, but I still want the site to be useful. It remains to be seen how easy striking that balance will be. Feel free to offer feedback!
Thanks for following HikeMtShasta and being so supportive. I really value that!
Nice, congratulations on the book!
Thanks much!
This is such great news! I used to work at The Fifth Season and would refer customers to this site all the time! I’m sure your book will sell really well here, as there’s already so much demand.
Congratulations and keep up the good work!
-Lauren
Thanks a lot for all the referrals! I really appreciate it. I was told by Ben Gerber (good friend of mine) that the Fifth Season would carry it when the book comes out and I am really excited to have it there!
Awesome! Ben is a great dude!
This is great news and the perfect, obvious next step from your blog. I’m so glad it happened for you. Congratulations.
Bubba, you did it! Not once, but twice 🙂 Congratulations. I’m gonna pick up a copy of the Shasta book and head down there sometime this summer. Maybe we can hit a trail together? Well done!
Thanks Adam! I really appreciate it. Needless to say, I can’t wait until they are actually in print. For what it is worth, I bought one of yours too!
Definitely give me a holler when you come down this way and we should go hiking. My wife and I have a guest house and if you don’t feel like roughing it, you are more than welcome to stay there whenever you come down to this area!
Thanks, Bubba! I’ll be taking you up on that generous offer for sure. Hopefully sooner than later 🙂
I am so thrilled that you are putting all this valuable info together in a book but…I wish you would comment on which trails would be appropriate for us older folks that enjoy riding our horse into some of these beautiful areas. Here are two groups that should be allies in keeping the wilderness available for future generations. Hook up with Backcountry Horsemen.
Thank you very much for the support. No worries about unsubscribing too, I understand how busy things can be. I certainly would be happy to team up with Backcountry Horsemen. To be honest though, I am not sure that I am the person to go to, since I am a one-man operation. The Mount Shasta Trails Association does a lot of great work on stuff, but they generally focus on things right around town. I am happy to pitch in on works days though! I am pretty keen on equine access to trails though. My four year old son has been taking riding lessons for 9 months and I want him to be able to ride the trails when he is older!
Congrats on your book deals. I know you’ve put a lot of work into this site and it shows. Like you, I love documenting my hikes and putting that information up on my blog for other hikers to access. I wish my presentation was as polished as yours, but it is what it is. I wish you well in your new endeavor.
Thanks George. Getting the books done has been a much more difficult process than I anticipated. I hope you keep posting your hikes in New Mexico! I enjoy it a great deal.