.
This site has had full or partial outages from time to time,
usually lasting no more than a few hours; one day at most.
For a few years now I have been posting route maps for
the hikes described on these pages at a third-party website:
www.MapPedometer.com .
This site has had full or partial outages from time to time,
usually lasting no more than a few hours; one day at most.
However in September 2025, the website became completely unusable, and the dozens of routes I posted there appeared to be permanently lost. I expected the domain would soon be bought by squatters and so began making plans to (a) erase all references to MapPedometer from my pages, and (b) find an alternative way to post route maps and store those routes locally.
Eventually I settled on creating route maps in GPX format. These are plain text XML files; to make use of them, you will need to install a GPX-aware app on your desktop or mobile device. You may also need to do some fiddling with your browser configuration to streamline passing the GPX file to your app. For more details, including some app recommendations, see About Route Maps and GPX.
Several weeks into the project of creating GPX files for all of my hiking routes, I noticed that MapPedometer came back to life. And all of my old routes were still intact. As a result, I've modified the plan -- I'm keeping links to those route pages alive for now (aside from routes that are obsoleted by trail reconfigurations or corrected map data) while the main goal is to continue adding and updating GPX files to these pages until all of the hiking routes described here are available in that format.
Despite the unreliability, MapPedometer does have two key advantages. One is that the maps it serves up are rendered online; i.e., all you need is a browser, no external app is necessary. Another is that you can use it interactively as a scratch space for planning your own hike.
The original (November 2020) version of these hiking pages
might have passed for modern ... around the turn of the century.
Five years later, I decided that upgrading the look and feel and
making the source files HTML5-compliant
[wikipedia ]
was long overdue.
So in parallel with the migration to GPX files, I began working on taking full advantage of CSS and removing the archaic structures in the old source files. All while scrupulously avoiding JavaScript. The main objectives, in addition to HTML5 compliance:
Although the project is not finished, as of today (18 Nov 2025) it is sufficiently stable and useful that I've let it go live. The navigation bar and drop-down menus are now in place at the top of every page, and although the display-adaptivity is not perfect, it is definitely an improvement.
On mobile phones (in portrait mode), removing the frame has helped reclaim valuable horizontal space, although you may still need to do some pinch-zooming to make it readable.
On a desktop, you'll notice that the lines of text do not stretch out as you widen the browser window. The stretching stops once the display is wide enough to display a reasonable amount of text per line. This allows for the best of both worlds -- a wide browser window will be better for displaying the many 16x9 landscape photographs posted here while at the same time keeping the dimensions of displayed text appropriate.
The main unfinished business is to weed out all of the old HTML attributes in these pages; some of them actively conflict with the new style sheets and have created stylistic glitches. At this point, only a few of the hike pages are finished in this sense. A good example of the finished look is the Island Lake Recreation Area page [Hike P5].
There are a few differences between the finished and unfinished pages that are easy to spot. One is that the thumbnail images in the photo galleries on the finished pages have borders and do a nicer job of adapting to a range of browser widths. Another is that the subsection titles in the unfinished pages are embedded in the first lines of their initial paragraphs.
If you're not seeing these changes, you may need to do some cache-clearing in your browser.