Warning: unapologetic hiking nerd-dom contained within! ?
A (somewhat) autobiography of my hiking history.
I have mentioned this “radius” hiking to a couple of the posters on the board before while out in the mountains, but figured I would lay out more details here in a proper post for those curious about all the different ways we like to approach this hobby of ours. I’ve done lots of hikes and outdoor adventures outside of any radius too, but in this post I want to focus on this certain ongoing project/approach I that find fun and satisfying.
Growing up in a very small town in Maine, it became quickly apparent that my favorite kind of hiking was “exploratory” in nature. I liked nothing more than getting out the Maine Atlas at breakfast on Saturday morning, pushing aside the plates of eggs and bacon to lay it out on the table, pointing to a hill or mountain, and that afternoon setting out from the road nearest it to make the summit. Trail or no trail it didn’t matter. Maine’s round, gentle mountains carpeted in forest and relaxed private property laws were very suitable for this. There was never really terrain that could be at all dangerous. Just lots of gentle, lovely forested slopes.
Hills and mountains with popular trails intended for hiking never interested me as much. I was out there to discover things for myself, not follow a pre-planned specific route someone else made with a bunch of other people doing the same thing to get to the same place. Nothing wrong with it, but I recognized early on not my favorite style.
After a few years I started to get more serious about hiking and maps and when I was 13 years old decided to become a little more organized and systematic about it. Make sure I bagged every single one worth bagging. How could I go about that in a logical, progressive, efficient way? The radius project was born.
I would roughly bag all hills and mountains in order of distance from my family’s home, one mile at a time. So I used a pencil and a compass (the drawing kind, this was 1999 and I didn’t have a computer mapping program yet) to draw a 3-mile circle on my USGS topo map around my house, and decided within that circle what hills and mountains I wanted to bag. (Basically anything with a reasonable amount of prominence.) After traipsing through forests, farm fields, housing developments, etc with my father by he end of the year (1999) I had bagged the 11 “peaks” I had wanted to, all lying within the 3 mile radius of my house.
If they didn’t have names, I gave them my own. And they usually didn’t.
Then I drew a larger 4 mile circle, and did those in 2000.
I got a Garmin GPS unit in 2001 and used waypoints to be sure we made it to the summits. By the time I graduated high school in 2004 and left for college, my father and I had bagged 98 hills and mountains, reaching about 10 miles or so. Lots of adventures and memories exploring and making fun discoveries, and just spending lots of time out in the woods with my father. A few were done as backpacking trips, too. Winter time it was in the snow. And we never, ever did the same hike twice.
College, moving around the country, being in a touring indie rock band, and generally being a nomadic 20-something stuff followed. But when I visited home back in Maine, my father and I still made a point to get out for a radius hike, and the radius continued to grow, if at a slower rate. (The original Maine radius is currently at ~160 unique hikes)
Meanwhile I went on tour with my indie rock band in the Western USA, and I saw the mountains there for the first time and my mind was blown away by the terrain and I knew where my destiny lay. Good news was my career dreams of working in music for film (whole other parallel story) brought me to the mountain west basically anyway. In 2011 I moved to Santa Monica with my girlfriend (now wife) and in this strange, exciting land I decided to begin a new radius.
After a few neighborhood bumps and drive-overs, the radius entered the Santa Monica mountains and I completely fell in love with the sandstone and chaparral. It was so new and different from Maine, with sweeping ocean views at every turn, and rugged ridges cutting into the sky. That first winter discovering the Santa Monica mountains together with my wife, who was hiking for the first time, was unforgettable. She built up some modest strength and endurance, and a love of nature in her blossomed. There were a few hiccups at first while I figured out how to effectively navigate this new environment (one early hike we followed a drainage ditch into a gated community in Brentwood and got escorted off the premises by security guards) but I relished the new navigation challenges of LA area hiking. Satellite imagery became incredibly useful. It was at this time I started using Google Earth, so I have all of those hikes traced. Behold, The “Franklin” radius (named after the street we lived on) My wife named all of these hikes herself. At least the hikes she joined me on, which was most. I always relish the route-planning challenge of comprehensively covering new trails with as little repetition as possible, while being a hike of appropriate difficulty and length. The LA radiuses quickly became as much about bagging use-trails in addition to peaks.
105 “Franklin” radius hikes from 2011 to 2015:
In 2015 we moved to Van Nuys, and the radius here presented us with adventures in new Mt ranges - The Verdugos, Santa Susannas, and the first foothills of the mother of them all…. Elysian Heights. Just kidding. The San Gabes, bro! Gone were the ocean views, but the Tiara radius offered more variety in geology and geography as we explored the fringes of the San Fernando valley. I definitely didn’t re-do any of the territory in the Santa Monica Mts that was overlapping with the Franklin Radius. Never do the same hike twice! From 2015-2020, I did 81 Tiara hikes.
The Willis radius was kinda the Tiara radius 2.0, with most of the SFV fringe stuff having been already completed. The winter of 2020-2021, in the midst of the pandemic with little baby Forest in his carrier, was another unforgettable hiking season. The mountains were our refuge and our escape during those long, long months of isolation. In November 2020 we did our first hike in the front range of the San Gabriels proper. Dillon Divide to Lopez Canyon park, point to point with Forest’s car seat on my back. It had been a long time coming to start getting into the proper San Gabes, and I was thrilled about it.
Here is where the 'Willis' radius stands currently, 2020-present, with 96 hikes. FYI, red placemarks are hikes I haven't done yet but are on my to-do list when a good opportunity arises. Currently I've planned out everything within 11 miles.
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Certainly I was in heaven the whole time, but I realized it may be time to find someone else to hike with me on the more ambitious adventures I wanted to go on, and stop torturing my poor wife! But who?!
The latest chapter in my hiking journey is finding the Eis Piraten message board…. And some of you know the rest! Here I’ve found hiking friends who in fact push ME, which is a new and exciting experience. Hikers who are into the off-trail exploration too, which has always been my favorite, and is something I’ve never been able to do with anyone but my father, who at 67 is getting to the age where his enthusiasm for that sort of thing has understandably diminished. I’ve learned new skills like the fine art of lopper scrambling, to boot! And I must give a shout-out to Sean, who has really with much generosity invited me into the fold on some excellent group hikes, just like I know he has done for others here as well.
With all 3 radiuses combined, here are screenshots of primary areas where I’ve hiked in the LA area, for those curious.
The Santa Monica Mts:
Altogether now in my career at the age of 37 I’ve done 512 unique hikes that I’ve officially catalogued, many of them within radiuses, and then plenty outside of them, too. I feel like the memories of my hikes are pretty biographical in nature, as I’ve moved to different places in different times of my life. My plan is to eventually cover the entire globe and hike every single hike possible. Then I’ll start looking towards other planets, which maybe Dima can help with. So cheers to 512 more hikes, hopefully plenty shared with some of you folks!
