There is enormous scope for hiking stories from around the USA and Canada, and this section should expand in the coming months as members contribute their own stories.

The first detailed walks have been posted covering days out hiking to Mount Diablo and Mount Tamalpais from San Francisco city, together with another walk over the Golden Gate Bridge to the Marin Headlands, and a run/hike across the city itself.

If you have any good stories or photos of hikes from North America, please let us know.  Go to Contribute a Story or E-mail stories@walkingstories.com

There are a number of good stories from the New York Times which we have linked into the site (registration with the NYT site is free). 

The first of these is a walk through the desert with a difference in California, by Rob Nixon, dated 27 March 2005.  It sounds pretty dramatic:

" Wandering down Big Morongo Canyon, you have the sensation that your feet and eyes are traveling through two disconnected landscapes. Underfoot, you could easily be in, say, the Wisconsin woods, crunching the trail's piled leaves. But look up and the eyes take in a very different world: a forbiddingly arid, mountainous terrain, dotted with saw-edged yucca plants and teddy bear cholla cactuses, lumpy in silhouette."

There are apparently easy walks in canyons within the city limits of Los Angeles according to this article by David Handelman from 23 July 2004.

Another story in the New York Times by Christopher Solomon from 15 June 2003 describes a visit to Ross Lake, 130 miles from Seattle, and a climb to a hut frequented by Jack Kerouac.

“Just 130 miles from Seattle, the lake is touched by only one public road -- a dirt one, at the Canadian end. To the west and south lie the more than 300 glaciers of toothy North Cascades National Park……The path to Kerouac's perch tests pilgrims' devotion: a stitchwork of switchbacks that zigzags 4,400 vertical feet in less than five miles.” 

It makes a great story!

Finally, for now, there was a bunch of reports about hiking in Hawaii, in the New York Times of 11 February 2005

Lauren Cabell gives practical advice on climbing Mount Olomana, near Honolulu.

Bonnie Tsui paints a colourful picture of the walk up Waihee Ridge on the North Coast of Maui:

"The trail is lined with common and strawberry guava trees, which offer shade and litter the ground with sweet-smelling fruit. "