Progress Report – 500 “Featured Hikes” – January 2024 Update

In 2019 we posted about our goal to complete 500 “featured” hikes from William L. Sullivan’s “100 hikes” guidebook series. The following year we finished the first of the five guidebooks (post) and followed that up by completing two more in 2021 (post). That left us with just the Eastern Oregon and Southern Oregon/Northern California books to complete. In 2022 we managed to make significant progress on the hikes to the south by checking off 28 featured hikes from the southern book, but just 6 featured hikes in the eastern book (post). That left us with a reasonable shot at completing the southern book in 2023.

We began the year with the remaining 19 southern hikes on the calendar along with 8 more eastern hikes. As is usually the case things did not go exactly as planned. Two of the hikes we’d planned during our first trip to Grants Pass in May were inaccessible due to lingering snow, but we were able to push them both back to later dates and complete them later in the year. We completed our 99th and 100th featured hikes on 10/09/2023 (post).

Then on our first tip to Eastern Oregon in June resulted in our deciding to switch the version of Sullivan’s book from the 3rd edition to his more recent “100 Hikes Eastern Oregon” 1st edition. (The edition numbers reset when Sullivan changed the title from 100 Hikes/Travel Guide simply to 100 Hikes.) The switch was prompted by us not feeling comfortable with, or having the time to make, the drive to Dug Bar (post). Dug Bar had been removed as a featured hike in the newer 1st edition, along with a few others, so making the switch allowed us to avoid that drive. The tradeoff was needing to return to Steens Mountain in SE Oregon to hike one of the new featured trails at Threemile Canyon, a mere 350 miles from Salem. At least that trailhead was located along a paved highway though. We rearranged some hikes in both 2023 and future years to move up the new featured hikes and were back on track. We wound up completing 10 featured hikes instead of 8 from the eastern book, but after subtracting the 6 former 3rd edition featured hikes that we’d completed, and adding one new featured hike that we’d already completed we ended the year up only 5 from the end of 2022 (84 vs 79).

Here is where we now stand at the end of 2023, having been on 484 of the 500 featured hikes:

100/100 – “100 Hikes in the Central Oregon Cascades” 4th Edition 2012 (post)

100/100 – “100 Hikes/Travel Guide Oregon Coast & Coast Range” 3rd Edition 2009 (post)

100/100 – “100 Hikes/Travel Guide Northwest Oregon & Southwest Washington” 4th Edition 2018 (post)

100/100 – “100 Hikes/Travel Guide Southern Oregon & Northern California” Edition 4.2 2021 (post)

84/100 – “100 Hikes: Eastern Oregon” 1st Edition 2015

With just 16 more hikes to check off to complete our goal we are on track to finish the final hike in August 2024 somewhere in the Wallowa Mountains. Happy Trails!