Field Notes
Urban Hiking
Trails inside the city — and what's reachable before dinner.
Bozeman, MT
Bozeman Built a Trail System Out of Handshakes and Easements
Nearly 100 miles of trail start inside Bozeman and run to the mountains, and most of it exists because a land trust spent thirty-five years negotiating easements across private ranchland one landowner at a time. The M and Drinking Horse are the famous pair. The system behind them is the actual story.
San Francisco, CA
The Greenbelt Nobody Planned: Hiking the Bay Area's Open Space
Ringing seven million people is one of the largest protected greenbelts around any American city: well over a million acres of parkland, watershed, and open space, assembled piecemeal over a century by agencies that mostly weren't coordinating. You can walk into redwoods, chaparral, and coastal prairie from a transit stop.
Los Angeles, CA
A Mountain Range Inside the City: Hiking Greater Los Angeles
Los Angeles has a mountain range running through the middle of it and a taller one along its northern edge rising past 10,000 feet. The city that everyone pictures as freeway and sprawl is bounded and bisected by wilderness, and most of it is a twenty-minute drive from somewhere you already are.
Portland, OR
Forest Park Is 5,200 Acres and the Gorge Is 40 Minutes. Here's How to Use Both.
One of the largest urban forest reserves in the United States sits inside the city limits, with a 30-mile trail running its length. Forty minutes east, a river gorge cuts through the Cascades with more waterfalls per mile than anywhere else in the country. Most people use one and ignore the other.
Boise, ID
Boise's Ridge to Rivers: 210+ Miles of Trail Starting at the Edge of Town
A single managed system of more than 210 miles of trail runs from the north edge of downtown up into the foothills and keeps going to a ski area at 7,000 feet. You can start a hike from a city park and finish above the treeline without ever leaving it.
Missoula, MT
Missoula Hikes You Can Walk To From Downtown
A university town of 78,000 people sits where five valleys meet, with a mountain rising straight off the campus and a 61,000-acre wilderness up the road behind the houses. The famous hike takes forty minutes and most of the town has done it drunk at least once.
Chattanooga, TN
Chattanooga Is the Best Hiking City in the South and Barely Advertises It
A city of 190,000 people sits in a gorge where the Tennessee River cuts through the Cumberland Plateau, with a 2,000-foot mountain on one side, a plateau escarpment on the other, and a long-distance trail running along the rim. Some of it is a fifteen-minute drive from downtown. Most visitors ride the incline railway and leave.
Seattle, WA
Hiking Inside Seattle: Discovery Park, the Greenbelts, and What's 90 Minutes Out
Seattle hikers talk about the mountains and skip what is in the city, which is how you end up driving two hours on a Saturday for something you could have walked to. There is a 534-acre park with saltwater bluffs inside city limits, a wall of foothills half an hour east, and real alpine terrain ninety minutes out. Here is how to use all three.