 Welcome to Road Gear Reviews. I'm Mark and I'm Julie from RV Love and today we're talking about the Mountain Directories. Stay tuned. In our last review we did a review of Ray McNally Road Atlases and I mentioned these mountain directories and I feel these are an invaluable tool for route planning. So what are these mountain directories and why do you need them? Well you know basically a road atlas is going to be able to show all the roads that you might take but it doesn't show you what grades you might encounter and between these two books there's one for the west and one for the east. They cover 700 different mountain passes and also about 22 states covered and those are the states that have the bigger hills. A lot of people think the big hills are out west because they're the big mountains out west but it's more than just the size and the elevation of the mountain. It's the grade of the steepness of that road and the reason grades are important is because if you're trying to climb up that hill especially in hot weather your RV or your large truck might get overheated and it could cause engine damage or transmission damage and so on the way down on a hill that's even more dangerous because the brunsel's brakes overheat you can be in real trouble. I mean I don't know if any of you watching this have ever been going down a hill when your brakes start to fade but if the engine's revenantly high and you can't hold your speed anymore and then the brakes pedal starts going soft and you smell the brakes it gets to be pretty stressful and so with a tool like this you're able to plan your route much more effectively. So there's two versions of this book one for the east and one for the west and if you only travel in one region you'd only need one book. They're about eight and a half by eleven and they're fairly thin books but they're packed with great information. So let's have a quick look inside. The cover actually shows what a lot of the inside pages will look like on individual states but when you open it up it has a nice introduction on why it's important. The person who wrote this is an over-the-road trucker for his whole career has a lot of experience and it's really worth reading because there's a lot of really great educational information in that introduction. Yeah and so a table of contents the states are listed in alphabetical order and then when you come to the first state this one being Arizona you'll see it's a map of Arizona and all those little yellow triangles are the mountain grades and mountain passes and so you'll see a number on each one of those and that number corresponds to one of the numbers over here but let me give you a couple examples of when you might use this. Let's say you're in Gunnison, Colorado down here and you want to get to Denver. Now if you go away the GPS says to go it's going to take you the most direct route it's going to try and take you up here or up here over all these passes you see there's about seven or eight of those little yellow triangles in that little route. Now if you look this way you can take this route and there's only one mountain pass to get for all the from Gunnison to Denver so if you have a vehicle that doesn't do well on grades it would probably be a good idea to pick the route that only has one major grade instead of seven and then you can read about what each individual one of those passes is like because you might have a route that has one major grade either way you go but one might be a lot less intimidating than the other. In New Mexico Julie and I were recently in Carlsbad, New Mexico and we wanted to go to Alamogordo, New Mexico near White Sands so you can see on this route there's almost nothing that has a scary grade on it except this one yellow triangle right here and if you read about that triangle that's number three so you go to number three, Cloudcroft Hill. The following signs appear as you leave Cloudcroft Westbound. Warning truck or steep grade 6% for 16 miles from Cloudcroft West. Continues on goes because all the specifics of that entire downhill including at what mile marker you might see a runaway truck ramp there's two of them on that downgrade. The top of the hill starts off with 30 mile an hour corners and it goes to 45 mile an hour corners there's a tunnel at this distance gives really detailed information so you know exactly what to expect on that hill and so when Julie and I were planning that day's travel we realized it was going to be 100 miles or so from when we started until we get to the top of that Cloudcroft Hill and then pretty much from there on it's just a steep little bit up and a long 16 mile downhill of 6 to 7% grade which is pretty steep and we just get to the bottom and we're almost to our final destination so it made total sense for us to simply drive the bulk of the drive and then when we start getting up the steep part of the uphill disconnect the car and she can drive separate that way not carrying the heavy car up or down that long grade to our final destination further on that if you know that 16 miles of 6 to 7% grade is going to be too much for your RV and you don't have the opportunity to disconnect a motorhome from a car you're a truck and trailer then you might choose a different route so instead of going north and across on 82 you might go south from Carlsbad and come through Texas and then back up to Alamogordo because this grade number 13 is only 2 to 3 miles of a 7% grade instead of 16 miles so that's a whole lot more manageable for a rig that has a tough time with grades that's a great example of how this could be used so the western book over here is 400 mountain passes and steep grades over 11 states and the east book is 300 mountain passes and grades over 11 states and some people think oh well the east coast they don't have the big mountains but they do they have really steep grade so what the elevation might really matter for the power on getting up over the top if you're driving up the pass but coming down those hills it doesn't matter what elevation you are it's the grade the steepness of that hill doesn't matter if you're going from 10,000 to 6,000 or 6,000 to 2,000 if you're going down the same grade it's gonna feel the same to your vehicle. So we have the paperback versions here of this book which are also pretty light which is nice because we don't like too much weight in our RV but they're also available as e-books and as an app on your smartphone so they're about $15 each for the paperback version and about $25 to buy both versions east and west combined on your iPhone app so the great thing about having these in the app is you don't need to be online in order to use them so it doesn't matter if you're out of the cell coverage area you can still access the data in the map on the directories it's really simple and straightforward it's pretty much a representation of the image that you'll see in the books but another thing I really like about this app it is a really nice large type and spacious so it's really easy to read because so let's do a quick wrap-up on what we think based on our personal experience of these mountain directories. Yeah personally I think they're awesome your road outlaces and your GPS can show you the most direct route but it's not necessarily the best route and when you have a larger RV they have some limitations on being able to pull the big grades going up or down and so that's why it's really important to get tools that will specifically talk about the grades you might encounter. We've never been in a situation that's been really dangerous but I've definitely been in situations that got my heart rate going up a little bit that I was starting to realize my brakes were getting hot so this mountain directories are a fantastic tool for route planning either to change the route you're going to go or to at the very minimum at least know what to expect and plan ahead and make some changes to your driving accordingly. So we hope you've enjoyed this review on the mountain directories if you liked this video give it a thumbs up and we'd love to hear your comments down below do you have them or have you had some bad experiences on steep grades where these could have really helped you out let us know in the comments below and of course we'll put the links to these directories down in the description below and be sure to check back every week for new videos here at Road Gear Reviews and until next time see you on the road. Please note that the mountain directories are published by a small independent publisher we've put the links down below to buy the e-book and also the printed books direct from the publisher's website as well as links to buy the apps for Apple or Android.