Knopf, $19.95

Review by Emily Looney

August 13, 1999
Web posted at: 11:33 a.m. EDT (1533 GMT)

(CNN) -- "Is that cow parsnip?"

"Maybe it's water hemlock."

"It isn't Queen Anne's Lace."

And so it went, for several happy days kicking around the Colorado Rockies with my old friend and fellow flower-lover Joy.

We took turns scouring the National Audubon Society's "Field Guide to the Rocky Mountain States" to try to identify the wonders living and growing as high as planes fly, while her husband Brian was off identifying notes at bagpipe camp.

The pocket-sized book is stuffed like a mountain trout with bite-sized bits of information about the region's geology, habitats, wildlife, birds, butterflies, bugs, trees, wildflowers and weather patterns, including clouds.

Clouds are big in the Rockies -- when you're so high up, they're right there. The book proved its merits with them: nothing too in-depth, just a little photograph and enough of a description to allow you to point and say with some certainty, "towering cumulus."

The softcover guide also includes brief descriptions of parks and other natural areas in the states it covers: Colorado, Idaho, Montana and Wyoming.

As it happens, the field guide's diversity of information is both its strength and weakness, which combine to make it one good book to have among others.

There's so much information, it can be tricky, at least for an amateur, to find specifics on the spot. Back to the wildflowers, for instance.

The flowers are grouped by family name, reasonable enough until you realize their colors and shapes can seem to coincide only tangentially with such order. It would have been easier (for us, anyway) to find the flowers by more visual groupings.

But Joy and I also enjoyed the smatterings of everything else, also grouped by families, tucked into the guide's thick, glossy pages. So did the friendly boy who, on a guided bird walk, used the book to show me an American pika, a round-eared rabbit-looking animal he'd seen on another outing.

And in its way, it was reassuring to have pictures handy of a Rocky Mountain wood tick and a Western rattlesnake. (Maybe the next edition can flag dangerous whatnots with red ink; this edition uses bold caps but in small print embedded in text to declare: "CAUTION.")

After awhile, Joy and I stopped referring to the guide much while outdoors and just looked and listened and breathed in the sun-laced, oxygen-light air while we had the chance. Now back indoors with the book, I can use it to help keep the memories, and to plan to make more. I've even recognized a flower or two.

Next time, I'll pack a book with more about wildflowers along with this guide and be glad to have both.

Emily Looney is an editor at CNN Interactive.