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Appendix D: Land Agencies and Information Sources

About the Author

Summary of Featured Trips

Mount Hood from the ridge above Shining Lake (Trip 50)

Introduction

As a child, I often dreamed of embarking on great backcountry adventures designed to test my outdoor skills in a remote wilderness setting. I would spend hours poring over maps of those increasingly rare but always enticing areas without any roads, planning out huge 100-mile-plus hikes to explore the imagined wonders within those boundaries. Invariably my visions included plenty of wildlife, outstanding scenery, and opportunities for both quiet introspection and grand adventure. In my youthful imagination these trips would last for several days or even weeks, a time span that, I thought, would allow me to fully immerse myself in the solitude and grandeur of the wilderness. In later years, I was lucky enough to take many such long adventures and even to write guidebooks describing some of my favorite long hikes.

I still take my share of long backpacking trips, but now that I am barreling headlong into middle age, nursing two long-suffering knees, and have a life that includes myriad other commitments, I am forced to put limits on my youthful ambitions. And I am not alone. Many of my fellow baby boomers no longer have the time, the energy, or the inclination to take the kinds of long backcountry adventures that they tackled in their youth. Instead, we seek out short mini-vacations (usually on weekends) to places where we can escape the rat race for a night or two, refresh our spirits, and then return to our busy lives with enough fond memories to sustain us until our next wilderness foray—always, so we fervently hope, not too far in the future.