Progress Report – 500 “Featured Hikes” – Completed September 2024

We did it. This post is a long time coming. It marks the completion of a goal we set for ourselves in 2016, but actually started six years earlier. As we’ve mentioned before our hiking journey really began in 2010 when we purchased the first of William L. Sullivan’s “100 Hikes…” guidebooks. This book quickly became our go to for inspiration and prompted us to eventually pick up editions for all five areas covered in his series. The areas are the Oregon Coast & Coast Range, NW Oregon & SW Washington, Central Cascades, Southern Oregon & Northern California, and Eastern Oregon. Sullivan continues to make regular updates and today we own fifteen editions from the series, three covering each area. These updates typically mean changes to the makeup of the 100 featured hikes along with any changes affecting the remaining featured hikes.

These changes can be necessary due to a variety of factors. Closures due to wildfire, flood, or landslide damage are the main issues. Some featured hikes are on private land where the landowners may close or restrict public access. Lack of trail maintenance or abandonment by the managing agency can also be a reason for a hike to no longer be “featured”. One positive reason for a change in featured hikes is when a new trail or trail system is opened warranting inclusion. With the frequent changes to the 100 hikes lineup we initially weren’t sure how we would define the criteria for finishing this goal. In 2018 we decided that we would focus on a single edition from each area and when we’d hiked at least a portion of all 100 hikes in that edition that area would be considered completed.

Setting the single edition criteria led to three edition swaps. In 2020 we went from focusing on the 2016 4th edition of the Oregon Coast book to the earlier 2009 3rd edition due to one featured hike (Salmonberry Railroad) being closed to public access with no timetable set for reopening. The following year we changed editions of the Southern Oregon book going from the 2017 4th edition to the 2021 edition 4.2. Three hikes that had been featured in the 2017 edition had since been badly burned and were going to be closed for an extended time prompting Sullivan to replace them for the time being. Finally, in 2023 we switched from the 2015 3rd edition of the Eastern Oregon book to the newly formatted 2022 edition. (Sullivan stopped using “editions” and printing any years on the cover based on feedback from bookstores.) In the latter case he had removed Dug Bar as a featured hike, most likely due to a long drive on what he had described as a road so bad it required 2 hours to drive just 25.4 miles. We had driven the first 14 miles of this road for the featured Eureka Bar hike (post) and had zero interest in repeating those 14 miles, let alone another 11.4 that were said to be worse.

The swapping of the Eastern Oregon editions did present the largest issue to the entire quest for 500. One of the new featured hikes, Juniper Hills, was a pair of short hikes on private land owned by the Nature Conservancy. Before we had a chance to visit the Nature Conservancy revoked public access to the trails. There was some hope that they would begin allowing public access again in 2024, but after reaching out to them this past May it appears there are no plans for that in the foreseeable future. In the end we decided to drive to the two trailheads, get out and walk to the fences to take photos. The painted hills there were the main goal of the featured hike and those were at least visible from the fence line (post).

While we did not get to hike nearly any of the 3.9-miles of trails at the Juniper Hills, we did manage to hike a good majority of the miles covered in the featured hikes.

Using unique miles, that is counting 2.5-miles for a 5-mile out-and-back or 5-miles for a 5-mile loop, we’ve hiked 84% of the total miles possible over the 500 hikes. The numbers are broken down below:

Possible     Completed    Percent
Area                      Miles          Miles            Completed
NW Oregon         593.4          540.2             91%
Central Cascades  562.1          506.5             90%
Oregon Coast      468.9          381.8             82%
Eastern Oregon   644.4          507.3             79%
Southern Oregon 564.1          440.6             78%
Totals                  2832.9        2376.4           84%

We have completed 100% of the miles for 345 of the 500 hikes and at least 50% for 458 of them. The missing miles stem from a variety of causes from closed portions of trail to some of Sullivan’s featured hikes having options of up to 40 miles (Timberline Trail loop around Mt. Hood). In the case of Eastern and Southern Oregon there were several extended backpacking trips where we visited the lakes and/or viewpoints of featured hikes, but we did not come from the trailheads for those hikes. We do plan on going back to some of these hikes to visit of the things we missed, but we have no intention to try and complete 100% of all 500 hikes.

We completed the Central Cascades in 2020 (post) just over a week before the September 8th windstorm driven fires burned over a number of the featured hikes.

The fires in 2020 created a sense of urgency for us to complete the remaining books as soon as possible. We managed to finish both the Oregon Coast (post) and NW Oregon (post) that year. As 2022 began we hoped to complete the Southern Oregon book in 2024 and Eastern in 2025.

We made good progress on Southern Oregon in 2022 completing 29 featured hikes. Those came at the expense of time spent in Eastern Oregon where we only picked up 6 featured hikes. (This became 7 when we switched Eastern editions the following year.)

In 2023 we continued to focus on Southern Oregon and were able to finish that area in October (post). We made some progress in Eastern Oregon as well picking up 10 featured hikes, but the edition swap left us with a net pick-up of just five. Six previously featured hikes that we’d completed had been removed in the new edition and one hike that we had done in 2022 was added to the featured hikes.

With just 16 remaining featured hikes, all in Eastern Oregon, we planned three full weeks of vacation in the Wallowa Mountains and to spend Memorial Day Weekend in Prineville. We ran into the aforementioned issue with Juniper Hills and almost had another due to the Town Gulch Fire near Summit Point (post), but on 9/9/24 we stepped onto the East Eagle Creek Trail (post) and the 500 were complete.
Featured hike starting locations. Blue = OR Coast, Red = NW, Black = Central Cascades, Purple = Southern OR, Yellow = Eastern OR

The best part of having taken on this goal is that we were led to many different areas that we otherwise might never had visited. The books provided us with a reason to explore much of Oregon and curated a desire to hike as many different trails as possible. We continue to turn to Sullivan’s books, using the “More Hikes” sections from the back of the books for inspiration along with various other sources and authors. As the number of trails that we haven’t hiked dwindle the frequency of revisiting previous hikes will increase, but our focus will continue to be on new destinations. Happy Trails!