After hiking all of Glacier National Park’s 734 miles of trails in one summer and starting a blog about hiking in the park, Jake Bramante started getting peppered with the same question:

“I’m going to Glacier National Park, where should I hike?”

The question motivated Bramante to come up with the best answers possible through a high-quality map of the park with a variety of guide features. “Day Hikes of Glacier National Park”  became available last week and will be sold in Flathead Valley retail outlets.

Bramante, 36, said many quality guide books have been published about Glacier, but he didn’t want to repeat that task and he doesn’t believe the books provide the simplest, most-straightforward approach to picking a hike in the park.

“I don’t think the books do that. They are much more encyclopedic,” he  said.

Bramante’s topographic map shows 88 hikes for eight color-coded regions in the park. On the back side, the map has descriptive information with featured attractions on each of the trails. The hikes are broken down from the shortest, being less than five miles, to the longest, 15 or more miles.

“There’s 15,000 words on the guide side, so it is a pretty legitimate guide,” Bramante said.

One of the more distinctive map features is that trails are broken down into color-coded segments to give people an idea of how strenuous a hike will be. Green segments are the most level while yellow segments involve a climb and red segments involve a steep climb.

When the whole package is taken into consideration, people can easily compare and pick hikes, with suggestions from Bramante’s guide narratives.

“You have people who live here and they hike the same three hikes over and over again,” he said. “This gives them a lot more choices.”

Bramante said that he is a huge fan of social media and smartphone applications that could conceivably be vehicles for quick and easy Glacier guides, but he likes the utilitarian nature of his maps, which are printed on waterproof, plastic-based paper.

“It’s plastic, the batteries never die, and there aren’t reception problems,” he said, comparing it to mapping applications for smart phones.

Bramante put considerable thought into picking the 88 featured hikes, drawing from his considerable experience in the park. In 2011, Bramante managed to squeeze in all 734 miles of trail in Glacier, becoming known as the first person to do so in a single year.

From that, he started a business called “hike734” and his blogging website, www.hike734.com, which Bramante says “is all about helping people explore Glacier better.”

Last year, Bramante published a Going-to-the-Sun Road Driving Guide that provides interpretive information about more than two dozen stops along the historic highway.

The hiking map was a bit more challenging. Bramante built it from government Geographic Information System databases starting about five months ago. He said he “really had to knuckle down” starting last December to get the maps on the market prior to spring.

“It was a total scramble ... a product like this, you can’t put it out in July,” he said.

The $9.95 map is available through Bramante’s website, and so far they can be found at the Sportsman & Ski Haus and Rocky Mountain Outfitter in Kalispell, the Glacier Park Conservancy in Columbia Falls and the Montana House in West Glacier.

Reporter Jim Mann may be reached at 758-4407 or by email at jmann@dailyinterlake.com.