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Joshua Tree: The Complete Guide
This is without doubt the best overall guide book to the park. The same is true with each of James Kaiser’s books, also available for Grand Canyon, Acadia, or Yosemite. They are printed on high quality glossy paper, and are full of information and beautiful full color photos. There are guides that do a better job with individual subjects like hiking, but nothing is better as a one book solution. We use this book personally and recommend it.
Purchase from: AmazonHiking Joshua Tree National Park
This is the Joshua Tree National Park entry in the extensive Falcon Guides series. When looking for a hiking guide book of a park, we generally look for the Falcon Guide first. With few exceptions, they are very good at what they do, and we like to have a consistent format to get used to. Like most books in the Falcon series, there is also a much shorter “Best Easy Day Hikes” companion book, that describes only the shorter hikes. It is listed next.
Purchase from: AmazonBest Easy Day Hikes Joshua Tree National Park
This is the Joshua Tree National Park entry in the extensive Falcon Guides Best Easy Day Hikes series. This is the shorter version of the book above. It focuses on the shorter, easier hikes in the book, although some can still be quite steep. There is less general information, and the trail information is more abbreviated, but if all you plan to do is the quick and easy trails, you can save a little money over the full guide above.
Purchase from: AmazonBest Climbs Joshua Tree National Park
Rock climbing is a very popular activity in Joshua Tree National Park. There are many guides available for it, but this is one of the newest, and it is published by Falcon, the producer of the above excellent hiking books.
Purchase from: AmazonNational Parked is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking to Amazon.