Washington Trails
Association
Trails for everyone, forever
Washington Trails
AssociationTrails for everyone, forever
I made a goal to write 100 trip reports in a year. I didn’t expect it to change the way I thought about hiking. | By Tiffany Chou
I’ve always been a numbers person. I like keeping track of stuff.
When I first discovered hiking, I was drawn to the stats; I even made a spreadsheet tracking mileage and elevation gain of my hikes. Physical activity always kind of scared me (I hated P.E. in school; that carried into adulthood), but I fell in love with hiking. In a way, those stats showed me “what I could do.” My attachment to the stats meant “hiking” had a specific definition to me, bound to a trail’s distance and climb and its proximity to the mountains.
A decidedly un-urban 2025 hike to Enchanted Valley. Photo by Vince Rhodes.
I found WTA’s trip reports and used them extensively as a newbie hiker to know where to go and to get up-to-date information to stay safe. Because of that — and my love of tracking things — I wrote my first trip report about my first-ever solo hike, and I never stopped writing.
By the start of 2024, I’d written 167 trip reports.
I’d been inconsistent with both hiking and writing trip reports for a while due to some health issues, but I had been gradually getting better, so I made a trip report goal to get outside more.
The goal: get my 200-trip-report badge by the end of the year. I needed to write 33 reports.
I started going on a hike about once a weekend. It felt nice to wear down my trail runner tread and click that trip report “submit” button. I could tell getting outside was doing me good, so I started planning hikes with friends when we’d normally get coffee or dinner. My friends varied greatly in the hikes they enjoyed, and our hikes ranged from low-key park rambles to intense huffing-and-puffing excursions.
I hadn’t written many trip reports for my local outings in the past. For some reason, it hadn’t felt “worth it,” like maybe folks wouldn’t find it useful for me to share conditions on my urban hikes.
Small cherry blossom blooms at the University of Washington. Photo by Tiffany Chou.
But as the year continued, I’d visit local green spaces — many new to me — and they felt too delightful to pass up writing trip reports for.
A vivid waterfront sunset. A bounty of springtime blossoms. A tiny turtle on a log. It seemed almost a waste not to post trip reports on these hikes, if only because I wanted to share the pictures I’d taken.
So, I did. I wrote about my hike — after all, shouldn’t everyone know it’s time for flowers or mini turtles? — and proudly shared my favorite pictures.
Over time, I discovered that folks did get useful information from my urban trip reports. Someone liked my pictures of colorful blooms at the Washington Park Arboretum. Another hiker asked which lake separated Mount Rainier from Seward Park. Someone else recently thanked me for sharing a map of the West Duwamish Greenbelt, which can be confusing without one. If the “helpful” votes have been any indication, other hikers were getting something out of these reports (if only some nice pictures).
Once I started writing trip reports for my local hikes, it didn’t take long to hit my trip report goal, so I made a bigger goal — posting 100 trip reports in 2024.
As the year continued, I kept finding special moments on my local trails I wanted to remember. A heron enjoying the beach. A perfect reflection of fall colors in a clear lake. A night hike (and I generally don’t love hiking in the dark).
And something interesting happened — a subtle, but significant, mental shift.
A tall mossy tree at Discovery Park. Photo by Tiffany Chou.
Before, when I’d plan my weekends, my goals would revolve around my original definition of “hiking,” ruled by the high country, long distances and steep slopes.
But that trip report goal — combined with my newfound appreciation for urban hiking — focused me on just getting outside as much as possible. Concentrating less on big hike stats also slowed me down; I took more breaks and paid more attention to everything around me. All of that, in turn, opened up my definition of a “hike.”
With each trip report I wrote, I became more eager to add new parks and urban forests to the growing list of places I’d been. Instead of consisting only of hikes with trailheads hours away on dusty forest roads, my trip report bank became peppered with hikes a 15-minute drive or bus ride away, parks I’d lived near for years but never visited and city trails I’d seen signs for but never stopped to hike on. For those who regularly enjoy our local green spaces, I know I’m late to the game. But, as they say, better late than never.
Sometimes I’ll log into my WTA account and scroll through my reports, just to remember the cool places I’ve visited, the beautiful things I’ve seen. It’s all cataloged and organized for me and makes flipping through my old adventures so easy.
Oh, and about that trip report goal — on my birthday in early December, I wrote my 100th trip report of 2024. I ended the year with 107.
Nowadays, I consider myself a more “well-rounded” adventurer — I’m grateful for how trip reports have slowed me down and changed the way I think about the time I spend outside. I still love the type 2 fun of a steep climb in the mountains, but I also love visiting an unfamiliar park and exploring a pocket of urban greenery. I often pull up WTA’s Hike Finder Map to find new hikes close to home and revisit local parks when feeling tired or down. I’m more mindful and take more breaths and breaks, and “hiking” these days includes more cityscapes and shorter drives.
Fall colors reflecting in a motionless, mirrored Lake Padden. Photo by Tiffany Chou.
And I’m always excited to post a new trip report because it’s another memory I can file away to look back on. I recently wrote my 300th trip report. I look forward to writing my 500th trip report. And my 1,000th. I just know I won’t tire of writing trip reports — whether for a multiday backpacking trip or a post-work neighborhood walk — anytime soon.
■ Tiffany Chou’s love of hiking has taken her across thousands of miles and hundreds of journal entries, over countless Washington trails and a thru-hike of the Pacific Crest Trail. She works on WTA’s communications team, telling the stories of hikers and trails.
