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06
May

Reader feedback: We find your book so valuable

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Recently a reader wrote in with wonderful comments we’d like to share with everyone.

Planting the seed

Crystal Falls October 2023 by Kathleen OBrien

“Hidden” Crystal Falls on Cascade Creek. Photo: Kathleen O’Brien, October 2023.

My husband and I live in Plainfield, Connecticut. We made two quick trips to Yellowstone before retiring; the first was in 1973 as newlyweds and the second in 1987 with our three sons. We saw little during those trips, but the seed was planted.

Start of an addiction

We both retired in 2011 and immediately began making plans for our 2012 retirement trip back to Yellowstone. That trip became the start of an addiction for us, and have done seven more trips since then. Each trip now entails more preparation and planning to make sure we can get in as much as possible in the weeks that we are there. That is why we find your book so valuable as a planning guide. I find the detailed alphabetical index especially valuable when I am looking for a specific feature.

I own the 2017 edition, which I find extremely useful when planning trips I have taken since then. I have used the book extensively as we plan different attractions and hikes in road order to make the most of our time. Being that we welcome Yellowstone’s surprise moments, we are always flexible, but are glad to have some logical order to our travels in the park. This shot of Crystal Falls that we took in October 2023 is one of the many places we “discovered” because it was mentioned in Yellowstone Treasures.

Thank you to both

Please share my gratitude with your mother for being inspired to create Yellowstone Treasures. This book is a wonderful, valuable tool for anyone who wants to discover something new in this beautifully complex land. Thank you both again!

Received April 25, 2024, from Kathleen O’Brien.

IN THE GUIDEBOOK

The place to spot Crystal Falls is described on page 175, the hike to see it much closer up, on page 178, Yellowstone Treasures 6th edition.

01
Aug

This summer in Yellowstone National Park

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Recently we had an email conversation with a reader who wrote in via our contact form. With his permission, we are reproducing it here, lightly edited. You may find it helpful when planning your own trip.

1937 Yellowstone Bus Everett Washington

1937 Yellow bus from Yellowstone Park, on display at Historic Flight Foundation, Everett, Washington

July 23, 2018
Hi Janet,

I am reading your book Yellowstone Treasures. It’s very nicely written and packed with tons of information. Thank you from a first-time visitor like me.

I will be traveling for the first time to the park in the first week of August with my family and friends. The location we chose to stay in that was affordable is outside the west side of the park. I am coming over from Canada.

I will be staying for five days. Is this time enough? I have divided the park in 4 segments, and each day I will be entering the park from the west. Is this approach right? What are some of the things that I must absolutely need to know? Does the park have wheelchair facilities? My friends’ parents are in their 80’s and won’t be able to do long walks. Does the park have rentals for golf-cart-type vehicles?

I will really appreciate your guidance and help. Thank you in advance for your response.

Warm regards,
Sameer

Recommended Walks in Yellowstone July 26, 2018
Dear Sameer,

Thank you for your kind comments about the guidebook. I put your questions to the author, Janet, and she asked me to write back to you.

There is never time enough to see everything, unless you stay all summer! However, the most essential sights are on Yellowstone’s west side. Be sure to allow one or two days for the area between Norris Geyser Basin and the West Thumb of Yellowstone Lake, where there are so many fabulous thermal features to stop for. “My other personal favorites are the Mammoth Hot Springs area and the Lamar Valley,” says Janet. Don’t try to see everything since you need to allow time for travel and meals. Rather than seeing all your four segments, maybe choose two or three? If you do want to see the east or south sides of the park, look for lodging in Cody or Dubois, Wyoming, since those can be cheaper than lodging in the park or Jackson.

You will be in the park at its busiest time, so expect bumper-to-bumper traffic on some of the roads. If you can start very early in the mornings, you will do yourselves a favor. It’s always a good idea to check the official NPS Park Roads page the map showing current road status and for the closing dates of various roads. Another way to beat the crowds is to bring picnic food and drinks in a cooler for your lunches and snacks. Yellowstone Treasures tells you about the picnic areas.

You also asked if the park has wheelchair facilities and if the park has rentals for golf carts. The visitor centers at Old Faithful, Canyon, and Mammoth will loan you wheelchairs, or you can rent them at the medical clinics (Old Faithful, Mammoth, and Lake). See the NPS Wheelchairs & Mobility page for more information. But there are no golf-cart vehicles. One of the most rewarding short walks is around Black Sand Basin, the nearest short side road to Old Faithful Village, and of course Yellowstone Treasures has a list of more short walks on pages 366-68. And be sure to check the guidebook’s maps for the wheelchair symbol on trails and restrooms.

Another option to look at for your friends’ parents is one of the many yellow bus tours (see Xanterra’s Land Adventures page).

Enjoy your trip!
Beth Chapple

Editor and Publisher
Granite Peak Publications

06
Jul

Where to get Yellowstone Treasures this month

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Until recently, two of the most popular places for you to buy a copy of Yellowstone Treasures: The Traveler’s Companion to the National Park were inside the park itself and from Amazon.com. But this year Yellowstone Forever has apparently made the decision (temporarily, we hope!) not to carry any guidebook they don’t publish themselves. The admirable nonprofit runs ten stores in the park, including a fairly big one at the Old Faithful Visitor Education Center and one at the Bozeman Airport. While you might look to snag a copy of our guidebook, with its sights arranged by road, when you first arrive in the park, the Yellowstone Forever stores don’t currently seem to stock any of the big guidebooks, perhaps to avoid appearing to favor one publisher over another.

Also, Amazon is having problems this week with distribution. Alhough they recently placed a large order from our distributor, yesterday the print book listing at Amazon read “Temporarily out of stock,” and today the message was “In stock on July 10, 2018.” (If you’d like the Kindle version, you can still buy that.) This Publishers Weekly article explains that Amazon is having trouble managing the truck deliveries from suppliers to their warehouses. And one reason for that might be their preparations for “Prime Day,” which is when Amazon Prime members see lower prices on many products. Prime Day is supposed to start at midday on July 16 this year.

Our advice to you is to buy a copy before you go. If you want it right away you have plenty of options:

  1. Find an independent bookstore (see Indiebound) and shop locally, buy from them online, or find one on your way to the park. One charming store is Country Bookshelf in Bozeman, Montana.
  2. Try Barnes & Noble, again either in person at a store convenient to you, or online. They often discount the price.
  3. Order right from this website at our bookstore. Our service is quite fast, and of course then you are supporting the publisher directly. We also offer 20% off when you buy two or more.
  4. Contact our distributor Independent Publishers Group, either online or by calling 1-800-888-4741. Best for trade buyers or when you want multiple copies.

I’ll leave you with a thought from reader Robert D. Rice, who wrote in his 5-star Amazon review on May 15, 2018: “Best guidebook I have ever read. No ambiguities, the descriptions and directions are very detailed. So many options available at every location I wish I had time to do it all. I love the focus on geology and I will enter Yellowstone almost like an old hand having studied this amazing book.”

Enjoy the park!
—Beth Chapple, Editor and Publisher

02
Apr

What are those pairs of numbers in the road logs of Yellowstone Treasures?

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Elk crossing Madison River, September 2016.

Recently two readers wrote to ask what the numbers next to so many entries mean. As author Janet Chapple wrote in her nugget called “The Features of Yellowstone Treasures,” “Some people get confused about how to use the mileage markings in the road logs in my book. I explain these in the Introduction [on page 17]. They show the distance from an entrance or major junction as well as the distance from the other direction, since a visitor may be traveling either way when consulting the guidebook.”

Here’s one letter we just received on April 1, 2018.

Hello,

Just purchased Yellowstone Treasures and still trying to figure what to visit in June this year and which trails to hike. I have one question, which I still can’t find the answer to while following the book.

You have numbers in front of some trails, like 0.0/20.5 “Yellowstone National Park boundary” on page 33 or 0.9/19.6 Dailey Creek Trailhead, and many others.

What do these mean? How should I use them in planning the trip and the places to visit?

Thanks,
Ross

Well, much of the guidebook is written as a road log, which means the author and her husband Bruno Giletti actually drove the roads to find out how far from the major road junctions or villages each trailhead or picnic area is located. To follow this explanation best, look at pages 286-87 in your book or open this link to the “From Norris Junction to Madison Junction” book excerpt. Each chapter in the guidebook starts with the junction or park boundary given as 0.0, like this:

0.0/13.4 Norris Junction. . . .

From there it’s just under 4 miles (3.9 mile) to the Artists’ Paintpots, so that paragraph starts:

3.9/9.5 Side road to parking for Artists’ Paintpots . . . [with icons that show you this is a recommended hike and there are restrooms]

But suppose you’re doing the chapter in the other direction, because you entered the park at the West or South Entrance and are coming from Madison Junction. Then you can see that the hydrothermal area is 9.5 miles from that end of the road (the second in the pair of numbers). See the map to confirm that Artists’ Paintpots is about a third of the distance from Norris to Madison (and for a recommendation that you look across the road in Gibbon Meadows for wildlife such as elk or bison).

We don’t really expect everyone to be zeroing their trip meter in the car every time they come to an entrance or a junction (though you could!). And people even use the book when they are riding on a bus tour. So the mileage indicators serve to show you the order of the sights and help you plan approximately how long it will take to get places. For example, if you are heading north to Norris, you know it’s just 0.6 mile after the Artists’ Paintpots to a picnic area.

When you are planning your trip don’t forget you can also use the driving distance chart on pages 20-21 to figure out how much you could get to see in a day. Hope that helps!

Photo Credit: The photo of elk is by Suzanne Cane. We use it on page 41 of Yellowstone Treasures, updated fifth edition.

—Editor and Publisher, Beth Chapple

01
Mar

Why we say it is Yellowstone National Park’s birthday today

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1872 Yellowstone act excerpt

Excerpt from page 50 of Through Early Yellowstone

On the first of March in 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant signed the bill setting aside “the tract of land in the Territories of Montana and Wyoming, lying near the head-waters of the Yellowstone river,” creating the nation’s first national park at Yellowstone. We reproduce the text of that act in our historical anthology, Through Early Yellowstone, to share with other readers what this foresightful law was meant to do. This land was “set apart as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people.” And the act continues to inspire governments to dedicate land for conservation throughout the world—just look at Chile and Peru for recent examples.

The month of March in Yellowstone also means that park roads start to close to oversnow travel, in preparation for plowing and reopening in April and May. While the road from the North Entrance (Gardiner) to the Northeast Entrance (Cooke City) is open year-round, today at 9 pm the road from the East Entrance to Lake Butte Overlook (Sylvan Pass) closes to snowcoaches and snowmobiles, and other roads follow throughout the next two weeks. Conditions permitting, there is also a schedule for reopening the roads for motorized traffic. See the Park Roads page at https://www.nps.gov/yell/planyourvisit/parkroads.htm.

This period between closing the park roads to oversnow travel and reopening them is a time when cyclists and hikers can travel the roads but car drivers are not allowed. See the National Park Service’s Spring & Fall Bicycling page to learn about the regulations and reminders, since you must still share the road with bears, administrative vehicles, and snow removal equipment. No services are available within the park during the spring shoulder season.

—Editor and Publisher, Beth Chapple

Updated August 20, 2018.

16
Aug

“We carried this book everywhere we went in Yellowstone. I loved all the history and extra information about each place we visited. I was reading to the people in my group and other tourists often stopped to listen. A great addition to any trip to Yellowstone.

— About the e-book

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This quote by lbrock21 accompanied a five-star Amazon review of the Kindle e-book on August 25, 2014. Readers are finding several advantages to getting a travel guide in electronic format, including saving weight while traveling. We released the updated fifth edition of Yellowstone Treasures in three e-book formats on June 30, 2017: ePub, Kindle, and PDF. All three offer live links to other parts of the book and sites on the Web, along with helpful full-color maps. Many e-book stores also offer the opportunity to get a free sample.
Yellowstone Treasures 5th edition cover

Readers find both the list of maps in the Table of Contents and the “54 Recommended Short Walks in Yellowstone” table to be handy, because they are organized by road log section in the same order as the guidebook. For example, if you find yourself at Canyon, you can see that all seven recommended walks on the chart can be found on the map on page 179 (a map completely revised for 2017).

Because the new Yellowstone Treasures ePub and Kindle versions have text that flows differently on every e-reader, they benefit from fully hyperlinked indexes that will get you to each topic or image. A quirk of the ePub is that text flow works best in portrait view for this e-book.

The PDF, on the other hand, retains the page numbering of the print book, so you can find topics by page number. Links go from the text nearby, not the page numbers. Look for the hand cursor. For example, on page 318 it says “a hydrothermal explosion such as the one that formed West Thumb Bay (see pages 138-39).” You can either put 138 into the page search box at the top (in Adobe Reader, for example) or click/tap on the words “West Thumb Bay” to get to the same place, where Janet explains how it’s a small caldera.

Here are a couple of tips that will help you get around with Yellowstone Treasures on different e-readers. In the ePub on the iPad, you can double-tap on an image or map to enlarge it. On the Kindle or Kindle app for iPad instead, you spread two fingers apart to zoom in, and then tap the x in the corner to close the image and continue.

As Ann Kristin Lindaas wrote us in April 2016 from Norway,

“I have already bought the print book and I really enjoy it. Essential for planning my days in Yellowstone! I will be traveling the US for about a month in September and I’m hoping to bring electronic versions of most of the books I’ve bought.”

Here’s to enjoying books in whatever form you choose! Cordially, Beth Chapple, editor and publisher.

14
Jan

Granite Peak Publications revises our logo

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Granite Peak Publications logo

In 2017, you’ll see this new logo more often.

Back in June, we got a surprising message. The logo we have used since Janet founded Granite Peak Publications in 2000 is a mirror image of the real Granite Peak in Montana! Ralph Saunders, a friend, avid hiker, and mapping expert with Rocky Mountain Surveys of Billings, Montana, let us know with the following note as he ordered a copy of Through Early Yellowstone.

Just a little note. The picture of Granite Peak in the logo is actually reversed. Turn the paper over, hold it up to the light and you’ll see the terrain as it actually is. Not a big deal but thought I would let you know.

Well, it is a big deal, and we will gradually rectify it to the one you see above as we publish upcoming editions.

19
Dec

Celebrate 2016 with a discounted Yellowstone book!

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This year the U.S. national parks have been celebrating the centennial of the National Park Service all year. We have been encouraged to get out and enjoy our now 413 beautiful and historic national parks and monuments, via the Find Your Park campaign. And on August 25, 2016, Americans said “Happy Birthday, NPS!”

Through Early YellowstoneAs part of the centennial celebrations, Granite Peak Publications released Through Early Yellowstone: Adventuring by Bicycle, Covered Wagon, Foot, Horseback, and Skis in June. The story about Alice Parmelee Morris called “Yellowstone Trails Blazed by New York Woman” was originally published in the New York Times in 1918, two years after she made the trip. All ten of the other main stories, as well as the numerous poems and short excerpts in the anthology also took place before cars were allowed in the park, during 1870 to 1916.

With entertaining travel accounts and many watercolor paintings and engravings, the book is a wonderful way to inspire someone you know and allow armchair travel to Yellowstone National Park.

Yellowstone Treasures coverNow is your chance to buy Through Early Yellowstone at 30 percent off or the very practical Yellowstone Treasures guidebook at 40 percent off. You can also get a holiday bundle with one of each book for just $40. Hurry, sale ends January 10, 2017.

28
Sep

Montana Book Festival news

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Beth at Montana book fair booth On September 24, National Public Lands Day, I hope you had the chance to get out and enjoy one of our beautiful U.S. national parks or monuments. I spent all that Saturday at the book fair of the 2016 Montana Book Festival in the heart of Missoula. Thanks to festival director Rachel Mindell and her band of hard-working volunteers, people had the chance to hear author talks and peruse new books with Montana-based authors or themes. While the book fair was free and open to the public, many participants bought a festival button so they could attend the various events. Some people stopped by the table to reminisce about Yellowstone Park, take a free Yellowstone Treasures postcard or Through Early Yellowstone bookmark, or buy a book. I’ll be taking the show on the road again for Wordstock in Portland, Oregon on November 5th–maybe I’ll see you there!

Fortunately I was able to combine a fun and research-filled road trip to Yellowstone with this book festival. I drove from Seattle with my son on September 18th, spent a mere four days in the park, and we drove back via Missoula. Author Janet and I will be sharing some stories and pictures from our trips over the next few weeks, as well as adding videos to our YouTube channel. Today I added a video called “Fan Creek 360 degree view.”

–Editor and Publisher, Beth Chapple

22
Jul

Yellowstone Treasures Kindle deal

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Amazing book to review before your visit to Yellowstone

Amazing book to review before your visit, but also to keep with you during it! Upon entering the park we were given a map, but this book has so many more detailed maps of each area that were SO helpful! I was responsible for planning a day and a half worth of activities for my group, and this book helped me to not disappoint! It explains EVERY single feature of the park, split up according to region. Seriously, check this book out and your friend will think you know it all. Can’t wait to go back to the park–according to the book, I missed out on A LOT.

—L, Amazon.com 5-star review, June 22, 2016

The price of the Yellowstone Treasures e-book in three different formats normally varies between $12.99 and the list price of $19.99. People all around the world can now easily buy it, as we discussed in an April post, “E-books for international readers.”.

Now, for just this calendar month, July 2016, Amazon.com is offering the Kindle version of the guidebook for $3.99! That’s a bargain for the Updated Fourth Edition, which boasts more facts, anecdotes, history, and travel tips than ever before. To get selected for this deal, a book must have high customer ratings on Amazon.com (3.2 stars or better), and with 69 reviews, the updated fourth edition currently has a rating of 4.7 stars. Something to consider giving to someone you know who has a Kindle or the free Kindle app on the iPad?

—Editor and Publisher, Beth

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