Hiking from Here to Wow ─ Utah Canyon Country

WOW. Think of it as the Wonder of Wilderness. Because that’s your destination when Hiking from Here to WOW: Utah Canyon Country by Kathy and Craig Copeland is your guide. It describes the 90 most compelling trails within our planet’s most bizarrely beautiful region.

The authors hiked more than 2,300 miles through Zion, Bryce, Escalante-Grand Staircase, Glen Canyon, Grand Gulch, Cedar Mesa, Canyonlands, Moab, Arches, Capitol Reef, and the San Rafael Swell. Then they winnowed all that exploration down to their favorite hikes: each selected for its power to intrigue, to stir, to dazzle, to mystify, to inspire, to thrill, and to incite awe.

Their 480-page book describes precisely where to find the red rock cliffs, slick rock domes, soaring arches, and ancient ruins that make southern Utah unique in the world. It offers the boot-tested advice you need to create rewarding adventures. And it does so in refreshing style: unstintingly honest, entertainingly written, lavished with gorgeous photography, creatively designed.

WOW Utah is full-color throughout, includes an easy-to-grok trail map for each day hike and backpack trip, and liberally dispenses the Copelands’ discerning counsel on how to make the most of every precious weekend or vacation. Their approach—separately presenting Opinion and Fact for each hike—is unconventional and extremely helpful. Their thoughtful, compelling descriptions interpret Utah canyon country in ways that are clever, poetic, penetrating, spiritual, startling, and sometimes just plain funny. So Hiking from Here to WOW: Utah Canyon Country provides hours of rapt reading even when you’re not choosing a hike.

This guide is is ideal for intermediate to advanced hikers keen to be on the trail for four to six hours a day.

Kathy and Craig are dedicated to each other and to hiking, in that order. Their second date was a 20-mi (32-km) dayhike in Arizona. Since then they haven’t stopped for long. Hiking and writing is their profession. Together, they’ve hiked more than 40,000 miles through wildlands worldwide. Their total book sales exceed 205,000 copies. They’ve trekked through much of the world’s vertical topography, including the Nepalese Himalaya, Patagonian Andes, and New Zealand Alps. In Europe, they’ve hiked the Scottish Highlands, Spain’s Costa Blanca and Els Ports mountains, Mallorca’s Serra de Tramuntana, the Alpes Maritimes, the Austrian, French, Swiss, and Italian Alps, the French and Spanish Pyrenees, and Italy’s Monti Liguri and Dolomiti.In North America, they’ve explored the B.C. Coast, Selkirk and Purcell ranges, Montana’s Beartooth Wilderness, Wyoming’s Grand Tetons, the Colorado Rockies, the California Sierra, and Arizona’s Superstition Wilderness and Grand Canyon.

Visit Kathy and Craig’s website: hikingcamping.com. You’ll find their articles are often mini-guidebooks, and their photo gallery is constantly growing. In 1989, they moved from the U.S. to Canada, so they could live near the range that inspired the refreshingly unconventional book: Don’t Waste Your Time in the Canadian Rockies, The Opinionated Hiking Guide. Its popularity encouraged them to abandon their careers—Kathy as an ESL teacher, Craig as an ad agency creative director—and start their own guidebook publishing company: hikingcamping.com.

They now migrate annually to southern Utah, where they wrote Hiking From Here To Wow: Utah Canyon Country. Though the distances they hike are epic, Kathy and Craig agree that hiking, no matter how far, is the easiest of the many tasks necessary to create a guidebook. What they find most challenging is the need to spend twice as much time at their computers—writing, organizing, editing, checking facts—as they do on the trail. The result is worth it. Kathy and Craig’s colorful writing, opinionated commentary, and enthusiasm for the joys of hiking make their guidebooks uniquely helpful and compelling.