The Hikes of 2024 – A Look Back

2024 was a big year for us hiking wise. It wasn’t the number of hikes (55 days on trail) or mileage (496.8), but the culmination of an eight-year goal to complete all 100 hikes from a single edition of William L. Sullivan’s five regional guidebooks (post).

With our focus set on finishing the Eastern Oregon book, and in the process the 500 hikes, we primarily stuck to Oregon this year. In order to complete that goal we took three separate trips to NE Oregon and one to Central Oregon. We did spend three days hiking in Washington but failed to make it to California or Idaho this year. We also only spent four days hiking in Southern Oregon in 2024.

Our easternmost hike was at Hat Point, Oregon above Hells Canyon (post).

Our southernmost hike was an overnight trip in the Sky Lakes Wilderness (post).

As always seems to be the case our westernmost hike involved the Pacific Ocean, this time at Crescent Beach (post).

Finally, our northernmost hike was during the same day as our westernmost hike. After visiting Crescent Beach we drove north to Oregon’s Fort Stevens State Park for a hike which was further north than any of the hikes we did in Washington this year.

As mentioned above there were 55 days spent hiking which included a total of 84 stops. Twenty of the stops involved trails that we’d hiked before but none of these were exact repeats. Out of the 496.8 miles 75.4 were repeated from previous years.

One unique aspect to this year was relying on different forms of transportation for two of the hikes.
In July we took the Wallowa Lake Tramway up Mount Howard (post).

In August we traveled by boat to Wizard Island in Crater Lake National Park (post).

We were fortunate to have good weather for most of the year. It got damp at the end of October and stayed that way for most of the remainder of the year, but our November vacation took us to Disneyland (post) where the weather was close to perfect. That was our first non-hiking (albeit a lot of walking) vacation since 2012.

While weather wasn’t an issue, wildfires were. In particular smoke from a record setting 1,937,512 burned acres beginning with the Little Yamsay Fire in April. The fires really took off in July and the fire season wasn’t officially declared over until October 28th.
The Town Gulch Fire near Carson, OR was dangerously close to blocking our access to one of the featured hikes we needed to do to finish our goal (post).

Here are a some of our favorite sights from the previous year.
January – Corvallis to Sea Trail

February – Sunrise from Maple Creek Road

March – Mary’s Peak from Fitton Green

April – Bridal Veil Falls

May – Fishhawk Falls

May – Willow Creek Trail

May – Juniper Hills Preserve (The trails here were/are closed so we simply parked along the road and took pictures.)

May – Madison Butte

June – Cook Hill

June – Deception Butte Trail

June – Mt. Adams from Big Huckleberry Mountain

June – Grasshopper Meadow (Unfortunately this area burned by the Young Grasshopper Fire in September.)

July – Horsepasture Mountain

July – Nasty Rock Trail

July – Lower Bonny Lake

July – Minam Lake

July – Mount Howard

August – The Pinnacles

August – Downing Creek Falls

August – Schneider Cabin

August – Pine Lakes Trail

August – Laverty Lake

August – Aneroid Lake

September – Hidden Lake

September – Mt. Jefferson from Sprague Lake

September – Black Wolf Meadows

October – White River Canyon

October – Kinzel Lake

October – Sawtooth Trail

October – William L. Finely National Wildlife Refuge

October – Gold Lake Shelter

November – Silver Falls State Park

December – McKenzie River Trail

We couldn’t have asked for much more out of this year’s hikes and for the first time in eight years we don’t have any specific hiking goals that we are working on. Our focus will remain on visiting trails that we still haven’t hiked as well as expanding the areas we’ve visited. Happy Trails!