Nature Walks in New Jersey by Glenn Scherer. Appalachian Mountain Club Books, 1998. 219 pages. $12.95 ISBN 1878239-68-6 [Available from Trail Conference Book Store at member prices.]

Why would you want to add this book to your ample shelf of guidebooks? Because it pulls them all together. You cannot leave your field guides home-in fact, you will be inspired to take more of them. And you will be scouring your other hiking books for more trails, because you will learn principles from Nature Walks that will help you anticipate what you might find in the same area or in similar topography/geology.

You might also want this book just in order to read it from cover to cover. I found descriptive phrases such as "tombstone gray bark" (beech trees), "the sunny face of yellow thistle," and "New Jersey's coastal plain was born out of a dance between land and sea" carrying me along with the pleasure of the reading.

Included in the 46 trail chapters are 32 nature essays. These are half-page elaborations that focus on one plant, animal, phenomenon, etc. Throughout the text nearly every paragraph is a "snapshot." Many include what I can only label as lore-altogether, an eclectic hodgepodge of fascinating facts.

Nature Walks includes a state trail-location map and a checklist of trail features. Each trail chapter is headed by a short description encapsulating the major reason to hike there. But you will want to make your own notes about when wildflowers bloom or the several hikes that include wetlands of a particular type, for instance. To help you fully enjoy the hikes, be sure to stop at the visitors' facilities described at the end of each trail chapter. There you can check for additional natural features and compare the site's trail maps with the book's very simple and generalized schematics.

Reviewed by Nancy K. Zimmerman