The Joy of Long-Distance Urban Trails

Happy Anniversary, Crosstown Trail - plus, a Pride ban in the Park Service, the most dangerous part of any outdoor adventure, pro tips for boot care, sequoia checkups, a festival for camas, and more!

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In June, San Francisco’s Crosstown Trail celebrates its 5^th anniversary, with a wide range of free events taking place all throughout the city to celebrate—on both the original(ish) Crosstown route as well as the newer “Double Cross Trail” that runs in the opposite direction.

one of the many beautiful views from the Crosstown Trail

Now, if you’re a fan of long-distance trails and backcountry adventures, you might not have heard of the Crosstown Trail before. That’s because the Crosstown is a 17-ish mile trail that takes you from the southeast corner of the City of San Francisco to the northwest—and the Double Cross Trail runs 14 miles from the southwest to the northeast. Not exactly an epic multi-day adventure, but still worth your time and effort nonetheless.

The Crosstown was first theorized by a group of friends in 2012, and after years of working with the city, local businesses, and outdoor nonprofits, the route was finalized in 2018 and opened to the public on National Trails Day in June, 2019 … and in reality, the route was still being tweaked a bit even as the public began to enjoy it.

My husband and I traveled to San Francisco in the summer of 2021 in part to hike “as much of the Crosstown Trail as our legs would permit.” We didn’t set out to do the entire thing in one day, but that’s what ended up happening—partially because really,

by the time you hit mile 12 your brain just justifies finishing even though you’re starting to get blisters, and partially because the route is just so dang lovely. You wind through parks, neighborhoods, urban staircases, old sand dunes, and all sorts of terrain that can be truly surprising, even to folks who know the city well. It’s incredibly peaceful for a trail that runs through the middle of a city, and really got me thinking about what a unified trail network can do for an urban environment.

a mural on the Crosstown Trail

As luck would have it, a few months later I met up with a journalist and writer named Miles Howard, who told me about a similar project called the Walking City Trail he was working on in my former stomping-grounds of Boston (quite literally: when I was in undergrad at Boston University, I would take long, aimless walks through the city, which I credit with getting my legs primed for discovering hiking in Los Angeles a few years later). Unsurprisingly, we spent most of our time at an outdoor press event near Joshua Tree talking about cities instead of wilderness areas (though we did very much enjoy those, too).

Yes, you get to see the Golden Gate Bridge, too!

These urban long-distance trails are often their own form of physical challenge—I definitely remember being pretty sore after the Crosstown—but they can also usually be broken up into smaller chunks to be more accessible for a wider range of people. They can spotlight neighborhoods, support small businesses, and introduce people to parks and places they might not have discovered otherwise. Plus, these trails can be an opportunity for the city to tell a story about itself—both for visitors and people who live there …

And as we head into the summer season, at least you know you’ll never have to fight for a permit, right?

RELATED

• Learn more about the Crosstown Trail’s anniversary events

• Subscribe to Miles’s Substack on New England hikes:
  

• I know Portland has its own 4T Trail (a manageable 9 miles) … but does your town have their own urban trail yet? Tell me about it!

The Big Story

Something to talk about

NPS Reverses Pride Ban?

National Park Service employees march in the Washington, D.C. Pride Parade in 2023 // AP

Well … that was kind of a weird way to lead into Pride month. At the beginning of May, the Department of the Interior released a memo stating that rangers and National Park Service employees were now banned from attending Pride events in uniform, reversing a policy that had been in place for many years.

The circulated memo was not Pride-specific but did mention requests from employees to wished to participate in “a variety of events and activities,” as well as the wish to “add adornments or ornaments like pins, ribbons, and buttons to the (NPS) uniform.” The memo basically said they were working on a new comprehensive policy and they’d have it in the coming months, and in the meantime said employees should keep their flair in check.

Now, unless you’re in the habit of trying to get government officials to go on the record or share information with you, you may not know that most staff at government agencies are extremely limited in what they’re allowed to say about issues and events. I have had trouble even getting out-of-uniform, off-duty employees to share their personal opinions on park policy with me off the record. So at first glance, this might seem just like some run of the mill bureaucratic BS … but it was … odd that it was followed by an additional memo that specifically said NPS participation in LGBTQ events like Pride parades “should be extremely limited.” You’d think that would make it tough for folks who work at a place like Stonewall National Monument, right?

Well, the story broke, and a few days later Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland reversed the directive via an agency-wide email, noting the Department of the Interior can use their already existing “Special Emphasis Months” as a guideline for events that further the goals of the Department and its individual offices. As The Advocate notes, those special emphasis programs “include observances for American Indians and Alaska Natives, Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians/Pacific Islanders, Black Employment, Federal Women’s Program, Hispanic Employment, Individuals with Disabilities and Disabled Veterans, Juneteenth, LGBTQ+ Pride, and Women’s Equality Day.”

I’m willing to give this the benefit of the doubt and just assume this was a case of dueling bureaucratic memos being cautiously interpreted, but 🏳️‍🌈Happy Pride🏳️‍🌈, fam—and if you see a ranger at a pride event this month, let them know you appreciate them showing up, OK?

Your Parks

Your Places

What’s the Deadliest Thing in National Parks?

Photo by Aleksandr Popov on Unsplash

Back when I first started hiking, my (very nervous, not very outdoorsy) mother would take every opportunity to remind me of all the things that could kill me outside. Parents, amirite? While doing research for my first book (Day Hiking Los Angeles), I dug into some safety statistics and discovered that despite all of the flashy, scary sounding threats—mountain lions, bears, rattlesnakes, rockslides, etc. etc.—by far the most dangerous part of any hiking trip I took was driving to the trailhead.

Well guess what—the same is true for national parks. A new report on fatalities in the National Park Systemfrom 2014-2019, totals 2,149 visitor deaths, and motor vehicle crashes account for 354 of them, followed by drowning at 314 and falling at 206. If you want to, you can drill into the data to soothe or feed your anxieties as you see fit.

Tech Talk

Gadgets, Technology, and Hype

Footwear Care

me wearing low-top hiking shoes at Mount Rainier. A rare sight, indeed!

What you wear on your feet while you’re outdoors is such a personal thing. At author’s events, people will almost always ask me if I can recommend a good pair of hiking boots, and my answer is usually “you really just have to go and try on a whole bunch and see what feels right.” Everyone is looking for a different feeling and has different preferences (for instance, I feel like I’m the only person who still prefers high-top boots to low-top train runners these days). But no matter what you’re rocking, there are still some good rules of thumb (or … rules of Big Toes?), and Advnture lays out 6 common mistakes folks make that can shorten the lifespan of your pricey footwear. So … don’t do those!

Wildlife Crossing

Wildlife and the Outdoors

Girders Up!

A view of the Wildlife Crossing in late May, 2024

Recently, the final steel girder was installed on the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over the US-101, which will be the world’s largest wildlife overpass when it’s completed. I will say—this project is moving along a lot faster than I was expecting it to (when I lived in L.A. it would take five years to paint a freaking bike lane stripe), and it’s really starting to actually look like a bridge! You can see the current progress on the crossing’s livecam, but you really want to get on their email list for the good behind-the-scenes stuff from Beth Pratt—which includes lots of terrific photos and news on wildlife in general.

Leafing Out

Plants!

Sherman’s OK!

the General Sherman Tree in June, 2022 // Wikimedia Commons

Although there is some distressing news about bark beetles making their way through oak trees in Southern California right now, Sequoia National Park’s General Sherman—the world’s largest known living single-stem tree—seems to be holding up OK for now. Despite an increase in bark beetles in sequoia trees in recent years, scientists coordinated by the Giant Sequoia Land Coalition recently climbed up into the 275-foot tall General Sherman and found only minor beetle activity.

Sequoias were previously thought to be immune to both bark beetles and, generally, mild wildfires—though the towering trees have fallen victim to both in recent years. Biologists who have studied the trees think this is likely due to changing climate conditions making the environment more attractive for existing and new species of bark beetle, as well as adding additional stresses on the trees themselves.

Celebrating Camas

a camas in bloom from my garden

In the northwest, fields of camas flowers used to be so enormous that the swaying blue and purple blooms were often confused for lakes. Now, we get freeways and strip malls instead, but the native wildflower is having a bit of a comeback these days, thanks to annual traditions like the Camas Festival, which is hosted by Linfield University in McMinnville, Oregon. The university launched the festival after its environmental studies students cleared a field of invasive blackberry only to watch an enormous meadow of camas sprout from dormant seeds. Working closely with partners at the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, the university has celebrated this flower for three years, spotlighting its importance to local ecosystems as well as to the indigenous population, which uses the flower’s bulb as a food source.

I unfortunately just missed this year’s fest, but there is an excellent feature in the most recent High Country News on the event, as well as the threats the plant is still facing.

For anyone else in the northwest, I grabbed a few camas bulbs from Sauvie Island Natives when I was first starting my native garden in Portland, and they come up gangbusters every year. Grab a bunch for the fall!

One More Thing

Oh yeah, before I go …

It’s been a bit of a week of ups and downs over here. File under good: after several years of applying, I was officially accepted into the Napa Valley Writers’s Conference for poetry, where I’ll be studying under poet Bruce Snider in a week of intensive workshops and readings. SUPER excited (and nervous) about this, but yay! File under meh: MAN the job market in Portland is rough, y’all. Just got another depressing form rejection letter for a position I was not only very qualified for, but one that I could have brought some true energy and joy to.

Anyone else thinking about setting up a script to auto-reply to form rejections of all kinds with a message that just says “Your loss!”? Just me?

Anyway, here’s some calming footage of a blue whale that was recently spotted near San Diego.

And thanks, as always, to you fine readers with paid subscriptions for keeping this project going!

Until next time,

Happy Trails.