Day Hike Inland Northwest: Spokane, Coeur d Alene, and Sandpoint, - 75 Trails You Can Hike in a Day

Informationen zum Autor SEABURY BLAIR JR. spent many years as the outdoor columnist for The Bremerton Sun , where one of his most popular features was the “Hike o’ the Month.” He is an avid backcountry skier and hiker, and lives in Spokane, WA. He is also the author of Wild Roads Washington; the Creaky Knees Guide series of easy hiking books (titles cover Washington, Oregon, and Pacific Northwest National Parks and Monuments); the Day Hike! series of easy hikes that you can do in a day (titles cover the Central Cascades, the North Cascades, Mount Rainier, the Olympic Peninsula, the Columbia Gorge, and Spokane/Coeur d'Alene) .   Klappentext Revised edition of: Day hike! Spokane, Coeur d'Alene, and Sandpoint. 2018. Leseprobe INTRODUCTION A whole bunch of things can happen in six years. Shoot, a whole universe flipped somersaults in the last four years. Say the “P” word with me. Six years ago, this space described a seventy-five-year-old waddler and his slightly younger partner, B. B. Hardbody, hiking seventy-five trails around Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, and Sandpoint during the summer of 2016. Now, at eighty-one (and slightly younger) we’ve retraced our footsteps on many of those trails. More importantly, we found a few new pathways that are more fun and interesting than the treks we’ve replaced. Back in the day, six years ago, I was an old stumblewheezer who couldn’t walk a mile before I collapsed on the trail like a wilted balsamroot. Today, I am proud to say that I can still collapse on the trail, though with six years of practice I am much more accomplished at finding the softest places to land. If five decades of backcountry skiing taught me anything, it’s how to land with the least chance of damaging anything important. While most everything urban—restaurant and pub visits, movie audiences, sports crowds—were shrinking, the trails gained users faster than a northern flicker can hammer that it owns your rain gutter. The great outdoors was the only place you could go to avoid the deadly ’rona, so Hardbody and I were not as alone as we were six years ago in tromping the wooded routes of Mount Spokane or the pocked plains of Fishtrap. The crowds made it no less pleasurable; in fact we were happy to make these newcomers feel welcome. I often demonstrated this by allowing them to trip merrily ahead, especially where stinging nettle or rain-drenched serviceberry and ocean spray hung over the trail, or rattlesnakes or wood ticks shared the path. Cruel? Mean-spirited? I think not. B. B. and I have had the better part of sixty or seventy years crashing brush, stepping on snakes, pulling ticks off our bodies, and licking melted chocolate off our pack pockets. It’s time to encourage new blood, though perhaps not literally. Since returning to our native Inland Northwest in 2008, B. B. and I have hiked many of the pathways we walked long decades ago. She spent several years as a Ferris High School student fascinated by falconry, tooling trails around Rimrock and Deep Creek, spotting roosting and nesting sites of birds of prey. As many as fifty youngsters joined me to stride some of those same trails with a guy named George Libby, back in the 1950s. We both came to love hiking the pine woods around Spokane, and we gained an appreciation of nature and passion for the wildlands that propels us up the trail today. Both our experiences then were limited to a relatively small area around Spokane, so we’ve spent the last decade getting to know routes that are more far-flung: the high country of the Selkirks and Cabinets, the rolling green of the Palouse, the lakes and mining country of the Idaho Panhandle and Bitterroots. Acquaintance with these new trails has been a delightful, though at times exhausting experience. Some of our most recent outdoor adventures in this neck of the woods have been with Washington Trails Assoc...

Product details

• Authors: Seabury Blair
• Publisher: Sasquatch Books
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 02.05.2023
• EAN: 9781632174635
• ISBN: 978-1-63217-463-5
• No. of pages: 304
• Dimensions: 128 mm x 178 mm x 17 mm
• Series: Day Hike!
• Subject: Guides > Sport > Other sports disciplines