A guidebook is easy, right? Do the research (that’s the heavy lifting), and get your notes to paper. The hard part is putting something down that’s actually useful while at the same time being good. But when you can deliver a satisfying reading experience while still providing a thorough set of instructions, you have a book that people will seek out because they enjoy using it. 4WD Adventures Colorado and Backcountry Adventures Colorado, by the folks from Swagman and Alder Publishing, fall into the useful and enjoyable category.

Well written, involved but approachable, functional and, most importantly, a good read, I’ve dog-eared Alder Publishing’s Colorado trail guide (done at the time as Swagman Publishing), and I can vouch that it works. I’ve been bonking around off-road for years, but I still suffer the same moment of trepidation as everyone else at a new turn-off. You know the feeling: What lurks off the pavement? Is it a killer afternoon jaunt to some forgotten spot? Spectacular scenery and a day well spent? Your alternatives could include bumper-deep mud, construction, a Superfund site (it is mine country), impassible trails, a shortcut to nowhere, or the unpleasant side of a cliff.

A few years back, while I still worked for Ford (hmm, smells like expense account), I was field-testing a 4x4 V-10 Super Duty and found myself with a week to kill and a new truck that Ford expected would come back with damage. It was about to be Thanksgiving, and I have a large number of friends and relatives in Colorado who know how to cook a turkey. Meanwhile, the state of Colorado is well known for it’s well-cooked trails and snowbound fun. Four Corners is only 13 hours from San Diego despite the factory 95 mph limiter … night run!

I’d packed all the gear necessary for whatever exploit the weather suggested. Had it snowed properly, my board was tucked neatly into the extra-cab for a week of powder. It was a bad year for pow, however, and after a particularly awful day at Purgatory looking for rocks to disaster my edges, I chose to do something less lethal with my time: exploring high-mountain trails off-season in a stock Super Duty. If there was that little snow at Purg, how much could there be on Colorado’s back-trail passes? Now to get a clue: I needed info.

If you have enough time and some friendlies in formation, you can pick a small mountain town and start hitting dirt roads like bulls-eying womprats in your T-36. I did not have these luxuries, though, plus I kind’a wanted to end up somewhere else after hitting the trails (one of the cool things about Colorado’s old two-tracks is that these are still byways – they often go somewhere rather than dead-end). Starting in Durango, I was planning to eat dinner in Colorado Springs. I raided a few of Durango’s better sporting shops for some maps and asked the locals about conditions. What I discovered were some great bars, several specific topo maps, a few interesting books about the histories of the area, and one piece of gold: 4WD Adventures Colorado. I grabbed a copy of DeLorme’s Colorado Atlas too, making sure I had every rut marked on paper. It’s a good backup for confirming routes from one book to another.

With some time in 4WD Adventures and valuable local counsel (thanks, Robal!), I chose a route through Silverton and over Cinnamon Pass – still somewhat passable in late November, and at only 12,600 feet it wasn’t the highest nor the most treacherous. Not so treacherous is good in late November Colorado, ‘cause at some points you’re two-day’s walk from electricity and I was rolling on showroom tires.

One of the most useful facets of the adventures in this book is that they’re not freaky, over-the-top efforts to crawl up the remotest cracks on Earth. 4WD Adventures Colorado was stuffed to the gills with trails (with GPS-tagged route notes) that the authors had run themselves in a slightly modified four-wheel drive HD Suburban. If you can get that bus through a hole, most 4Runners or Jeeps won’t have to blink twice to thread the same needle.

The history covered by 4WD Adventures makes yummy learning of the old townsites and et cetera of Colorado’s backcountry, and it’s the sauce that makes this book good. We’d like to know how many other guide books highlight the past so well: from Harry Orchard to Alferd Packer – the assassin and the cannibal – plus photos and details of everything from the Sunnyside Mill to the inside of the inaccessible Alpine Tunnel. As you worm your way through old Colorado, history comes to you as questions, and this book has a lot of answers.

After publishing coverage of the test run in one of Ford’s in-house magazines, I received a message from the boss of the Super Duty program. My throat went dry as I returned his call. I am not one to suffer in crises – some of my friends call me the AntiCrisis – but if I’d gone too far adventuring about, this guy could have me fired twice. He didn’t mince words (everyone prefers a quick death, so that was nice of him), but instead of putting me on a pike, he told me that it was one of the best evaluations he’d seen in years. Phew.

Let’s be honest: without 4WD Adventures Colorado, I would have had neither the understanding of the locale nor the confidence to make the run. Its concise coverage was enough to permit me a one-shot, one-kill trail run that I would have had to otherwise skip, with real-world landmark coordinates, and just enough touristy crap to entertain a girlfriend.

The ’99 version of Swagman/Alder’s book has been superseded by the bigger Backcountry Adventures Colorado, and the same outfit has done regionalized spin-offs to better focus their research to the neighborhood in which you’re playing. All, including the original 4WD Adventures Colorado, are available in Colorado bookstores, sports shops, and on Amazon.com, used and new. Just make sure your copy isn’t as used as mine.