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, Yosemite, and Zion. 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.

Hiking 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.

Best 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.

Best 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.