Utah is one of the largest outdoor playgrounds in the world, with incredible canyon country, lofty mountains, deep forests, and high desert all waiting to be explored. So it's no surprise that Julie Trevelyan took all of this immense landscape into account when she set out to write a hiking guide to the Beehive State.

If you're planning a trip to Utah to visit the five national parks there -- Arches National Park, Bryce Canyon National Park, Capitol Reef National Park, Canyonlands National Park, Zion National Park -- or one of the national monuments -- Dinosaur or Timpanogos, Hovenweep or Natural Bridges, or maybe Cedar Breaks -- 100 Classic Hikes Utah: National Parks And Monuments, National Wilderness And Recreation Areas, State Parks, Uintas, Wasatch is a great book to pack with you. For even if you don't find a hike from one of these units in the book (Hovenweep and Timpanogos missed the cut), there will be a hike nearby on state or federal lands.

A perfect example: While Ms. Trevelyan lists no hike within the borders of Timpanogos National Monument, which revolves around caves, she does detail a hike on the backside of Mount Timpanogos. That would be a gruelling, 11-hour hike up and down the 13.2-mile roundtrip route that takes you up in elevation 4,580 feet to one of the premier summits (11,749 feet) in the state.

100 Classic Hikes Utah is easy to navigate. The table of contents divides the state into geographic regions -- northeast, north central, southwest, south central, southeast -- and lists the hikes she covered under the appropriate region. Then you'll find a Hikes at a Glance table in which she further breaks down the hikes: Half-Day Hikes, Short Day Hikes, Long Day Hikes, Short Backpacks, and Long Backpacks. Each entry carries a brief description, a difficulty level, and best seasons to hike. These hikes also are numbered -- from 1 to 100, of course -- for easy reference.

To futher help you narrow in on a hike, there's a map of Utah with each hike listed by its respective number.

Why buy, and carry, this book when each week seems to bring us a new hiking app for our cell phones? Convenience, frankly. The amount of text the author devotes to each hike could drive you crazy if you tried to read it on your phone, either due to the amount of scrolling required or the small text. Plus, it's nice to have a quick glance of each hike's logistics -- roundtrip distance, hiking time you can expect, elevation gain, difficulty, best season to hike, respective USGS map, contact information, trailhead information, and notes that touch on things like any fees you might have to pay, toilet situation, bugginess. Ms. Trevelyan (a past Traveler contributor) also has included snapshot topo maps that let you visualize each hike, and color photos of some of each hike's highlights.

Then there's the author's writing style: rich on description, as evidenced by this passage from her entry for the Under-the-Rim Trail at Bryce Canyon National Park:

Backpacking Bryce Canyon just about ensures solitude as you traipse through the deep, hoodoo-filled amphitheater, benefitting from the less common view from below. Roughly a half circle, this trek allows you ample time to soak in the glory of seeing the unusual frost-wedged rock formations that draw people and cameras from around the world. Evergreen trees, including pointy Douglas firs, giant ponderosas, and bendy limber pines, dot the hillsides. Glimpse the pinnacles and spires that swirl up toward the sky, all fashioned into fantastical shapes that draw the eye and lend incredible diversity and beauty to this most excellent trek.

The author rightly notes in her introduction that the 100 hikes she chose don't encompass all of Utah's classic hikes, but just a representation of what can be found in the state. 

"The hikes were chosen primarily for their natural features rather than cultural or historical significance, but as Utah contans an exceptional amount of awe-inspiring evidence of ancient human inhabitation, several of the trails do focus on ancient rock art or ruins as well as beautiful natural scenery," she writes.