Two More Books Added to my Portland-Area Hiking Stack

This last weekend I drove downtown to my favorite retailer in the world, Powell's Books, to sell them some of the books I've recently read and no longer want to have occupy space on my shelves at home. I received roughly $15 in store credit and immediately bolted over to the outdoor section of the massive bookstore to see if I can find a few more books to add to my pile of Portland-area hiking books.

I found two that have not only broadened my hiking and photographing options significantly (and I mean significantly), but are outstanding books overall by a widely respected and thorough Oregon Outdoorsman, William L. Sullivan, who has written roughly 16 books about Oregon.

The first book not only contains 100 hikes in detail, but also includes an additional 108 hikes in the area! It covers all the wildernesses surrounding Portland minus the Oregon Coast, which has so many hikes that it got its own book (below). This book covers the Mt. Hood area, the Mt. St. Helens area, the Portland Metropolitan area's numerous nature parks, the Columbia River Gorge, and the foothills of the Clackamas River.

100 Hikes in Oregon and Southwest Washington, third edition, by William L. Sullivan (2011)

The second book has the exact same format as the one above, only it covers all the hikes along the spectacular Oregon Coast. It covers the entire coast, so needless to say some of the hikes you'll find within its pages are a 4 hour or more drive from Portland. But there is so much coastline to explore, that I am eager to get as far down the coast as possible in this blog. The book contains 100 hikes in detail, as well as 45 additional hikes listed in the back.

100 Hikes / Travel Guide to Oregon Coast & Coast Range, third edition, by William L. Sullivan (2010)

The first guide to the Portland Area hikes that I picked up from Powell's, the book that sparked the origin of this blog, contained 60 hikes total in great detail.

However, these two books put together contain 353 hikes total, with 200 of these written up in great detail!! I have already read through both of these books, and needless to say I am absolutely pumped up about tackling these hikes. Many of them are closed in the winter due to snowfall, danger, closed roadways up to trailheads, etc. But there are a good chunk of them that I can and will complete before the winter ends and the remainder of them open to the public (some of them open in April, others not until June, typically depending on the altitude of the hike).

In other great news, my new Nikon D3000 arrived and is ready to go. Expect crisper, higher quality photos in future blogs. I have also recently realized that my point-and-shoot that I've been using has the ability to shoot short video clips. Expect some of those in future posts as well.

Good things are happening with Black Watch Sasquatch: better guide books, better camera, and the ability to record video clips! Not to mention the Sasquatch himself is getting into better shape and will be ready to blaze some serious long-distance and high-altitude trails once weather permits.

The Book That Spawned This Blog

Hungry to truly explore every nook and crany of the natural beauty that surrounds Portland, Oregon, I picked this book up at one of Portland's landmarks, Powell's Books:

60 Hikes Within 60 Miles: Portland, 4th edition by Paul Gerald, 2010.

This book is meticulous and detailed to say the least. It will give you every single thing that you would want or need to know about the hikes listed within its pages, right down to driving directions, fees if any, and what sort of crowd you're likely to expect. I am grateful to Paul Gerald for writing this book, and to the detailed extent which he wrote it. The book does include photos, but not many, and they are black and white, which I'm fine with because a) it keeps the cost of the book down and b) I bought this as a guide book, not a coffee table picture-book.

So, in an attempt to find out what these hikes look like in order to get a feel for them before I hike them, I tried using internet search engines to find other's photos of these hikes.

Needless to say, I wasn't terribly thrilled with the results. Why don't people just stop and take a photo every once in a while to show others what it is like to hike this or that trail? I found very few photos that met the criteria of what I was looking for; and I ran a search for almost every trail listed in this book.

Most of the photos that I found online had that "stock photo" aspect to them. For example, I ran an image search on Mt. Hood's Mirror Lake trail and what did I find? The quintessential Mirror Lake photo with the lake in the foreground and Mt Hood poking out in the background, its reflection shimmering in the water. Great photos, but I wanted to see much more. What did the hike to get there look like? What does the lake look like from a different vantage point? I wanted more than just the picture perfect "Christmas Cardy" image of Mt Hood's reflection in the lake.

I spotted a gap that needed to be filled, and the aim of this blog is to fill it. In this blog you'll find photos, from the human perspective, of what it is like to hike Portland's wildernesses, mountains, coastal areas, meadows, and even city parks.

I also intend to make several entries where I urban hike Portland's varied and unique neighborhoods, to give viewers a feel for this city piece by piece and showcase just how different Portland's neighborhoods really are.

My ultimate goal is to have not only a generous photographic sample of each of the 60 hikes covered in Paul Gerald's book, but also a sample of each of Portland's neighborhoods. It will be a challenging task, but someone has to do it. And having loved this part of the country the moment I stepped inside of it, I will gladly take the challenge.