Sir Ranulph Fiennes is not everyone’s favourite adventurer, though he is mine. When the Guinness Book of Records calls you the World’s Greatest Explorer, people resent it. He has never feared positive publicity and has always been honest that he adventured to earn a living. Every year or two he releases a book, often hashed-together bits of his old ones. His attitude towards telling a straight story, as seen with his 1991 true-story-turned-fiction??? thriller The Feather Men, can be… negotiable.

There are things in common with Colin O’Brady, who now may be nobody’s favourite adventurer except his own. O’Brady holds records of the modern type, fastest to this, youngest to that, but won prominence in 2018 when, as the story goes, he became the first man to travel all the way across Antarctica, via the South Pole, by his own power, solo and unsupported. The specialist press was all over this claim even while it was being made, but after years of uncritical adoration from the mainstream media, Aaron Teasdale’s 2020 National Geographic article “The Problem with Colin O’Brady” put the fat in the fire.

Both Fiennes and O’Brady are professional adventurers, corporate speakers, and authors. Both were upper-crust before they were born; the “Sir” in “Sir Ranulph” has been with him all his life as his father, the second Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes baronet, was killed in action before Ranulph’s birth. O’Brady’s mother is a prominent businesswoman, NGO board member, and Democratic politician. Fiennes went to Eton, O’Brady went to Yale. Both are sometimes criticized for how forthright they can be about their true accomplishments.

Both men have skied the Antarctic landmass; Fiennes in 1992–93, with Dr. Mike Stroud, and O’Brady solo in 2018. Both wrote books about their expeditions, and neither quite achieved everything that their biggest fans might claim. Now the similarities stop. In one case, we see what might be called “honest spin,” a groping for lesser success rather than failure; not to be encouraged, maybe, but to be forgiven. In the other, we see spin of a different degree, better suited for politics than the white Antarctic.

It is 2022. Every trail of consequence in the Canadian Rockies has been shot through with YouTube videos and dissected by bloggers, and every park has detailed descriptions online. A book becomes dated with every spring flood and summer fire, while the forums and the Facebooks carry updates in close to real time. Do you still need to spend $29.95 on a trail guide?

When hiking a maintained trail, even a long and difficult one, the answer has to be no. You can learn everything you need for free, provided you can endure clickbait, trash, and crass self-promotion in some stranger’s report. It’ll even be more detailed. There is no park-spanning guide that could surpass anything focused on a single trail, not without being 50,000 pages long.

Yet, should you hike the Canadian Rockies, absolutely get the Canadian Rockies Trail Guide, the long-awaited tenth edition of which has been released in May 2022. Because there are things only trail guides do. The limitations of two covers, finite pages, and infrequent updates allow the creation of a resource which other media theoretically could match but never, ever do.

They capture information concisely and clearly in one place. They let you find the trail you’ll want to hike next summer as well as plan the one you’ve already decided on. They show routes and possibilities videos only gesture at. They let you scheme, and dream. In this edition Brian Patton and Bart Robinson not only provide some much-needed updates but, with a handsome new layout and full colour on every page, given us more room than ever to fantasize about hiking and then make those fantasies real.

If you hike the Lower Mainland and use the Internet you’ve seen the name Taryn Eyton, whose Happiest Outdoors blog is very prominent indeed. Far from the selfie-seeking Instagram influencer trying to get photos on Panorama Ridge and sell t-shirts; Eaton has done the trails, including the unglamorous ones, knows her stuff, and shares her knowledge with the hiking community even outside her website. I also infer from some photos that she owns the same previous-generation MEC TGV 2 four-season tent I do, which speaks well of her taste.

The compliments go up top to soften the blow when I say that I’ve never liked that site: it’s too click-baity, too “top 30” this and “big deals on” that, every keyword carefully inserted where Google will find them. The ratio of useful content to search-engine-optimization is way off.

But she’s got a book out, Backpacking in Southwestern British Columbia, which targets an underserved niche. There are between five and seven million books on hiking in the Lower Mainland, each describing a hundred and some-odd hikes that you absolutely have to do if you’re a walk-to-the-top-of-the-mountain-at-a-35-degree-angle type. There are books aimed at tourists and well-meaning grandmothers, researched mostly from Wikipedia, saying that when in Vancouver you should really try that Grouse Grind thing. There were, however, no good informed summaries on backpacking in the area and, since researching such backpacks means a quagmire of provincial park websites, forest recreation sites, and old Facebook posts, an expert guide would be invaluable.

Eyton is an expert, she’s done ’em all. But a guidebook and a 24-best-Black-Friday-deals blog are two very different things. I bought the book without high hopes: could she really take that expertise and translate it to a more concise, lower-frills context, and make it a success?

Imagine my surprise and delight when the answer was yes.