Where do you folks look to find new trails to romp around on?
I'm trying to plan my summer hiking, and need a place to find some new trails. I'm in southern oregon.

Sometimes this site, but because it's international not so good for local area.

portlandhikers.org, nwhikers.net

books like Sullivan's

so, what are a couple of your favorites?

Probably my favorite AREA is the sky lakes wilderness down by klamath falls.

I don't really have any favorite hikes in particular. Most of the hiking I have done is short 7-10 mile loops, and I'd really like to get into doing longer stuff. mini thru-hikes!

Thom Darrah lives in Southern Oregon (maybe K Falls?). He might have some suggestions.

You can always start with http://www.peakbagger.com/ and http://www.summitpost.org/

I moved to the coast this summer for a job from PDX and have been struggling to find good hikes as close and awesome as the Gorge. What luck I've had has been from looking at NF maps and hunting maps of the area and stringing roads and trails together. I used portlandhikers.org when I lived in Portland, and I still use it, but not like I used to.

That's for looking close to home for dayhikes and quick overnighters. I find the big, well known hikes here in Oregon to be fantastic enough that I don't mind a two hour (or slightly more) drive for two nights out.

Jeff

Edited by j.j.81 on 03/20/2012 05:53:26 MDT.

Rogue River and Illinois River are nice - low elevation so accessible year-round

The area above Applegate Reservoir is supposed to be nice, sort of on my list to do sometime but a bit far away from Portland - I think accessible earlier in the year than the Cascades

I should do Sky Lakes sometime

I found a couple of really good sites for finding trails...

One is a 200 mile long trail, where they converted an old foresting railroad to a backpacking trail, it's pretty mild as far as actual hiking goes:
http://www.oregonstateparks.org/park_230.php

But the big site I found was:
http://activities.wildernet.com/

They have 300+ trails in oregon, and a good number of them are longer trails.

I'm excited for summer to get around. Don't get me wrong, I like winter backpacking, but I'm itching to get into my hammock and do some fishing

I posted this in another thread a while back...

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First step is to get a big map. A State Road Atlas is excellent. Look at places that have few roads or cities around them. From there, go online and look at the USGS Topographical Maps (they are free), or better yet BLM maps (where available) are excellent at only $3.00 each. These maps are 1:100,000 scale. While they won’t tell you where most exciting places are, over time you will learn to find them.
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Traveling off-trail, or on remote, seldom used, trails is best. Few people are going to post those locations, because they will no longer be seldom used trails. :)