The Outdoor Adventure Giving you tips, tricks & recommendations to help make adventuring in the Outdoors fun, safe & exciting for you and your kids.
The Washington Trails Association, around for over 40 years has a magazine and a website. More than that it has a mission:
Mission: Washington Trails Association’s mission is to preserve, enhance, and promote hiking opportunities in Washington state through collaboration, education, advocacy and volunteer trail maintenance. Link
I can’t say I’ve read their magazine, but based on their website, I think I might subscribe. I certainly will use their website when looking for a good trail.
The website has a very cool Interactive Trail Map that allows you to select your hike criteria (eg. how far, how high, can I take kids?, are there campsites? lakes? rovers? waterfalls?). After filtering the results, immediately you get the familiar person hiking icon over a zoomable panable google map of Washington state. Just ready for you to choose your hike. ust make sure you zoom in as some hikes aren’t visible until you get up close to an area.
But that’s just the start. By hovering over the hiker on the map you get the things you want to know, length, elevation gain, peak elevation and user rating. Thats where you get the other useful info.
Once you click on a hike, the details appear on the right with a clickable link. Click the link and you can view trail reviews from people that have hiked recent. It helped me to make a decision not to take my kids on a specific hike (cougar with cubs on the prowl) and to want to go on a different one (not frequented very often).
I haven’t explored it all, but there was reason enough to bookmark it in my browser.
Take a look for yourself: http://www.wta.org/
