NorthwestAugust 19, 1993

With little more than three weekends of summer left before the school routine returns, outdoors lovers often attempt one last escape from the humdrum.

A half dozen books offer ways to discover new places, learn more about familiar surroundings or simply escape. And these offerings also contain elements that are sure to attract attention in the Inland Northwest.

One of the first in the current crowd of books to attract my attention was The Mountaineers' Washington State Parks: A Complete Recreation Guide.

Released in July, the guide by the Seattle-based publisher offers the best survey of Washington's nearly 200 state parks. Marge and Ted Mueller did an admirable job of profiling each of them.

A reader can't get much past the introduction's first paragraph without beginning to scheme was to escape.

The Muellers note the state's park system includes a 1,100-foot-long limestone cave, an astronomical observatory open to the public, 234 miles in two railroad bed trails, 70 miles of ocean beach, two dozen good-sized islands, etc.

At $14.95, the guide provides the detail needed to decide where to end up during the last couple of weekends of summer and how to get there.

Along the same line, the Camper's Guide to U.S. National Parks covers a wider area geographically. If there's a week of vacation or two left over, this may be the book to help plot a longer trip.

The guide by Lillian B. Morava and Mickey Little offers less detail about the national parks than some others and definitely less than the individual parks guides that the National Park Service prepares.

Gulf Publishing Co. of Houston has done parks fans a favor by providing a way to browse through the offerings. Volume 1 released last month offers two-to five-page descriptions of parks West of the Rockies from New Mexico to Alaska and Colorado to Hawaii.

Hot springs fans don't need a park to enjoy their surroundings. The revised and expanded edition of The Hiker's Guide to Hot Springs in the Pacific Northwest shows Evie Litton knows that and so does Falcon Press. The Helena, Mont., publishing house has made a science of issuing high class guides.

The book offers plenty of detail to find the state's best- and least-known hot springs. The detail is enough to anger some hotsprings fans.

Others will find the precise directions helpful in finding new places to soak, precisely the objection of those who favor protecting springs from too much use.

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Litton's description of Loftus Hot Spring along the Boise River's Middle Fork guaranteed at least one reader's attention.

Ken Goddard, director of the National Fish and Wildlife Forensics Laboratory at Ashland, Ore., produced the environmental potboiler of the summer.

The Tom Doherty Associates paperback Prey hit the shelves in Lewiston in late July. Its subject matter seemed tailored to the Inland Northwest audience that eagerly consumes daily press accounts of Earth First! exploits near Dixie.

In the book, a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service team of undercover agents tracking a rogue federal operation intended to neutralize environmental activists from organizations like Earth First! and Greenpeace.

The plot is very predictable. So is the ending. So what; when did those elements influence a summer reading list? This is a pulp thriller, we're talking about.

Prey is for reading gluttons, to be consumed as rapidly as possible without undue consideration for its possible socially-redeeming values. It moves quickly toward its conclusion with few stumbles along the way.

The last book on the list is a guilty pleasure of a different sort. It's hard to imagine reading a thriller too fast or having to many guidebooks.

Wayside Wildflowers of the Pacific Northwest by Dee Strickler hits the highlights of the floral kingdom across the region.

The book, another new Falcon Press offering, presents excellent photographs of wildflowers taken by the Washington State University faculty member during the past two decades.

The photographs are detailed enough to help travelers with a casual interest in wildflowers learn the names of what they've seen. The organization of the book, however, may be a bit too botanical for many readers.

While some guides rely on flower color or form to help track down the correct name, Strickler relies on plant families as its main organizational scheme.

That strategy makes trying to identify a plant difficult at times. Trying to identify a tall red plant spotted near Dixie meant going to the index to discover it wasn't the candystick sought by Earth First! activists.

A random search through the pages revealed pinedrops was a more likely identification for the plant. Although both are in the heath family, so are other flowers as different as the kinnikinnik and western azalea.

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