Hiking Books
Hiking Books are plentiful, but hiking books that tell you how to shed gear instead of add it on are hard to find, and the ones that tell you how to do it well are rarer still.
Below are a few of the better hiking books on the market. They'll explain how to do lightweight backpacking well and are a great supplement to the information you can find on this site.
Best Hiking Books
- Beyond Backpacking: Ray Jardines Guide to Lightweight Hiking
- Ray Jardine is one of the more well known lightweight backpackers out there, and he did a great deal to popularize the idea of lightweight backpacking. And this is the hiking book that helped do that popularizing. It was published way back in 1999 so it misses out on a few of the more recent innovations in the lightweight backpacking world, but it's still a hiking book worth having.
- Trail Life: Ray Jardine's Lightweight Backpacking
- Ray Jardine's new and updated version of the hiking book above. Though it still misses out on a lot of the more recent innovations in lightweight backpacking despite being an updated text, it's still packed with a lot of good information and includes some things that the first one doesn't. That said, you probably don't need both of Jardine's hiking books, as there is quite a bit of overlap.
- Lightweight Backpacking and Camping: A Field Guide to Wilderness Equipment, Technique, and Style (Backpacking Light)
- This is a book put out by the Backpacking Light folks, and is a collection of essays on lightweight backpacking. In terms of flavor of hiking book, it's quite a bit different than Jardine's hiking books, focusing more on the gear available on the market. But lots of good information is available here too, and it's worth adding to your collection of hiking books.
- The Ultralight Backpacker : The Complete Guide to Simplicity and Comfort on the Trail
- This book by Ryel Kestenbaum serves as a good introduction to the whole idea of lightweight backpacking. It's a bit out of date, having been published in 2001, so you wont find some of the newer lightweight backpacking gear and techniques in here, but as an introduction it is one of the better hiking books on the market, and worth checking out.
