Off the Beaten Trail!

I set a goal every year of hiking at least 500 miles with at least 100,000 feet of elevation gain. Most years I manage to accomplish this goal and then some, but for whatever reason, I did not make it to 100,000 feet of elevation gain last year. We had a lot going on last year, and it felt like we were unlucky at times trying to plan hikes. I think it rained something like 5 straight weekends towards the end of the year, while it was nice during the week. So it goes.

I did manage to visit some truly amazing places in 2024. We finally made it to Wizard Island on Crater Lake, after many years of waiting for the Crater Lake boat tours to reopen after the pandemic. Here’s a panorama I took during our hike to the summit of Wizard Island:

We visited Wizard Island on a vacation to California to visit Wendy’s family. We saw many other amazing places during that trip, from Mono Lake to the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest to hiking in the Eastern Sierra to visiting waterfalls in the canyons south of Mount Shasta. Our hike to Big Pine Lakes in the Eastern Sierra was my favorite hike of 2024:

We did some amazing hikes in 2024. Our main focus was on trying to go places that we had never been before, or places that we had not visited in quite some time. This gets harder every year, for me in particular. Since I started writing books in 2009, I’ve put in something like 10,000 miles on the trails here in the Pacific Northwest. While there are some hikes that I’ve done dozens of times, such as the Trail of Ten Falls at Silver Falls State Park, there are many others that I’ve done only a couple times over that time. I try to hike twice a week most weeks. Honestly, it’s amazing to me that there are still plenty of places that I’ve never been, or that I haven’t visited in a long time.

I think our favorite hike last year that we’d never done before was the trek from the Hummocks to Johnston Ridge Observatory on the north side of Mount Saint Helens:

By far the hardest hike I did was a trek with the Siskiyou Mountain Club through the Kalmiopsis Wilderness in southwestern Oregon. Over five days, we helped clear stretches of the Trans-Kalmiopsis Trail, hiking into and out of the rugged and remote canyon of the Chetco River. We hiked 23 miles and gained 6,700 feet of elevation while carrying heavy packs and doing a considerable amount of trail maintenance. I think you can see the fatigue on my face here:

I finally got to see the Chetco River and it was even more gorgeous than I ever could have imagined. I also got to see lots of rare wildflowers that do not grow up here in my part of Oregon. I also came home with a case of poison oak so severe that I had to go to urgent care due to swelling in my arms and legs. I’m not sure I’ll ever make it back to the Chetco, so even with the poison oak and sheer exhaustion that I experienced on that trip, I am very glad that I made it.

But despite all this, I somehow did not make my elevation gain goal. I’ll have to do something different this year. What do you recommend? Let me know.

Thanks for reading! This is my first post here, and I hope that you’ll follow my adventures as I write about them here, once every couple of weeks or so.

Cheers,
Matt