Kluane National Park Hiking Guide

Rating:
Summary: Recommends the muskeg
Review: Lots of hikes and routes through gorgeous Kluane National Park
are provided in this book. Additional background
information is scattered through the route descrtiptions. Useful
for planning a trip to Kluane, but once you get to the park
I highly recommend getting a route guide from the Parks Canada centre
and ignoring this book entirley. The book, or at least the
Donjek route described in it, is often confusing
and at points downright inaccurate. The book suggests that the
Donjek hike can be done in 6 to 8 days. The Parks Canada route recommends 8 to 10 days. It's definitely an 8 to 10 day hike. We
ended up hiking all day, every day, and it took a full 7 days.
In the summer in the Yukon the daylight will allow you to hike
14 hour days no problem and that's what we did most days to
complete the route. The guide says things like, "The horse camp
... will take two hours to reach from the pass". Now this is
an almost 4,000 foot elevation drop over 6 kilometers of terrain
as the crow flies. It's more like a 10 km hike involving cautious
step-at-time steep sections and numerous creek crossings and scrambling down or across large rocks. It tooks us a solid six
hours to hike. Odd inaccuracies like this continued to be
sprinkled throughout the route, but the worst offense was hiking
out via the "Granite Creek Cabin" route. This is a seperate
stand-alone hike in the book and is described as "a pleasant
walk along a road". What it fails to mention is that this
is a abandoned winter access only road and in the summer it's
just a hideous stretch of mosquitoe infested swamp and muskeg.
Bushes on the road have overgrown in so thickly they reach
20 feet at points. There are very few views along this hike
and it ends at a rotted log cabin in a marsh. The book describes
it as a "meadow" where "dry tent spots are at a premium". That
anyone could suggest this as a hike by itself is just
ridiculous.