The plan begins as follows: I will be taking a plane (which is both cheaper and faster than a train) from Pittsburgh, Pa to Seattle, Washington. From there I'm going to try to make it another 150 or so miles west to Cape Alava if I can. (Anyone out there have a friend in Seattle with a car and a day to kill? Gas and food is on me.)
Cape Alava, according to certain websites, is marked as the furthest point west in the contiguous lower 48 states, so I figured it would be a nice place to start. If I can't make it all the way out there, I will just have to console myself with the fact that the Puget Sound off of Seattle is salty enough to convince anyone from the Appalachians that I started at the Pacific Ocean. I doubt that's quite going to work with anyone who draws their living up outta the brine, but it'll work at least for telling stories back here at home.
Anyway, after all of that, I plan on making use of Washington State's extensive and highly reputed rails-to-trails system. Below is a map of every rails-to-trails trail that is both suitable for hiking and over 20 miles in length in the greater Washington State area.
I plan on taking the one that runs out of Seattle, right past Ellensburg, and on towards Missoula, Montana. You can see there are a few places (I count 3) where the trail disappears and I'm going to have to wing it. Those gaps are only about 50 miles in length at the longest, though, and, unlike the times I went hiking about 'winging it' through Europe, this time I will actually be able to speak the language and ask for directions if needs be.
From Missoula I am going to be going south and a little east all the way to Idaho Falls. There are some intermittent hiking trails along U.S. Route 93 that should help get me there, and the highway itself looks to be two lanes in most places, so for long stretches I am most likely going to be walking along the berm. It's about 300 miles from Missoula to Idaho Falls, but about 140 miles along the way there is a little town called Salmon and a road labeled State Route 28 that's even smaller and therefore hopefully better for the walking beside.
As a rule, I don't much care for walking along highways. People can be dangerous, but people in cars can be worse. This particular route, though, passes through a wildlife refuge or two and has quite a few smaller back roads paralleling it in places. As such, I'm betting that if I really get to feeling like I need to leave the side of the highway behind, there will be some relief. Here's hoping, anyway. The route also goes straight through Main Street of several towns along the way, providing sidewalks and slowing traffic down.
After planning out this route, I typed it into to Google maps just to see what would happen. This is what I got:
Yes it's blurry, and yes I had to move the route a bit so that it went through Salmon, Idaho instead of swinging out further into Montana, and yes this particular map isn't really legitimate since it's not actually the route I'm taking. Despite all of these huge and glaring flaws, though, you might notice that this less than quality image seems to suggest that the driving directions actually come out fairly close to the rails-to-trails route. So, based on that flimsy argument and the resulting semi-irrelevant data, I intend to declare that the first leg will be approximately 979 miles long. To be on the safe side, I'll be giving myself a good 2 months + to cover this route and intend to budget myself $1 per mile for food, new shoes, etc.
I was hoping for an even 1000 of course, but that would have just been too perfect.
Coming Soon: A overview of the second leg involving Cousin Pat's Idaho Horse Ranch, and a winter trek through Yellowstone.
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