In many ways, backpacking is like a cat. You can ignore it for ages but eventually it’ll be sitting on your stomach screaming in your ear.

The resemblances do not end there. Like cats, backpacking can be a pain in the butt but we wouldn’t want to be without it. Some people spend exorbitant amounts of money on their fur princess/10lb-base-weight ultralight backpacking rig while some people just let the thing survive off a dripping bathtub faucet and the birds it kills… I’m slightly losing control of the simile here.

Also, everybody loves to talk about their cats and everybody loves to talk about their backpacking. It is spring with a vengeance. As I write this the sun is shining through my window. Last time I went to my favourite shoulder-season campsite it was actually crowded. So it’s is officially The Season; the cat of backpacking is making kitty biscuits in my blanket and walking on my face. He has lots of food but still demands to be fed, and it is time that I got up and moved the kibbles of backcountry excitement into a little heap in the middle of the bowl of outdoor adventure.

So here are the hikes with which I plan to scritch beneath the chin of my nature needs in 2024.

(Nailed it.)

• May: the Olympic Peninsula North Coast, Washington (Shi-Shi to Rialto Beach). In 2023, expecting a big year, I decided to launch the season by hiking the West Coast Trail for the second time in May. Being the sort of backpacker who tends to hike himself into shape it’s good to get the year started early, and if I don’t want winter conditions (I don’t) that means coast, not mountains. Coast hiking tends to be beautiful, rugged, and memorable. Suits me.

  I have never hiked seriously in Washington State. I lived in Victoria for a while, I couldn’t even tell you how many times I personally looked upon the Olympic Peninsula in Washington and thought “that looks lovely,” you can see it literally from the West Coast Trail, and I have never been there. 2024 is the year. The idea here is to rip over to Port Angeles and hike from Shi-Shi Beach, near the northwest corner of the continental United States, to Rialto Beach almost a week south. Rialto Beach is not the end of the Olympic Coast hiking, but the Rialto River is an unfordable break between coastal sections, so is a thoroughly satisfying place to call it a trip.

  The Olympic Peninsula coast is by no means obscure, but gets nothing like the press of the West Coast Trail or even the Juan de Fuca Trail. I suspect that the reason is that the Olympic coast is much more freeform; the West Coast Trail is one hike, the Juan de Fuca Trail is one hike, but if you’re going though Olympic National Park you can burn anywhere between a day and a month according to time and whims. Any itinerary that comes pre-packaged will be more popular than one that isn’t, as the never-sufficiently-to-be-damned tourism companies have learned.

  I am curious to see how difficult this trail is; it has a reputation but from what I read it lacks some of the really obnoxious parts of, say, the West Coast Trail. There are no ladders, but there are ropes; the forest cut-offs around impassible headlands are relatively short. The campsites are not so well-appointed, and a bear canister (not an Ursack, mind; a bear canister) is mandatory as much for the rodents as for the bears. I’ve found a great combination of videos and blog posts by Jeanne Bustamante who did double my proposed itinerary with her husband last spring: Rialto Beach to Shi-Shi and back¹ in ten days with a day off. I have banked on six going in just one direction, and even bearing in mind that both my first and last day will involve little actual hiking as I camp pretty close to the respective trailheads², it’s a conservative itinerary as the numbers on the right show. It’s quite a lot shorter than the West Coast Trail, and as near as I can tell should be quite a lot easier.

  But, of course, that’s a guess; I don’t know. Hiking trail in the Rockies is not only mile-for-mile easier than the West Coast Trail, most of the time it’s quite a lot easier. Moreover, the tides on any coastal trail are important and on the Olympic coast they seem a bit funnily-spaced for convenient hiking, whereas on the West Coast Trail I know from experience that apart from Owen Point they’re pretty straightforward to manage. On the West Coast Trail there are nearly always overland bypasses if you miss your tide; not so on the Olympic coast. Every serious water crossing on the West Coast Trail has a cable car, so if you get whacked by an atmospheric river you’ll probably still be able to keep your schedule, while there are no cable cars on the Olympic Coast and one proper, big-boy ford of the Ozette River that calls for the lowest tide you can get.

  On paper, this looks like an easy-going vacation of a hike that’s just hard enough for me to feel good in camp. It may in fact be exactly that, but I don’t know and scheduled it safe. You know me, I like to get to camp early, sit in my chair, and have a nice time.

• July: the Sawback Hook, Banff (Mount Norquay to Lake Louise). To appreciate what I’m trying to do here, read my attempted big August 2023 backpack, meant to be between Banff and Lake Louise along the Sawback Trail. I made it as far as Mystic Pass Junction, just before Pulsatilla Pass and the Skoki region, before a combination of weather, equipment failure, and equipment forgetting-it-at-Forty-Mile-Creek sent me home. Mystic Pass Junction camp, where I spent the climactic night, was full-on Rocky Mountain gorgeous, but the weather had been brutally rainy for days, I had lost my Kindle so had nothing to read in camp, a broken phone and so nothing to watch or listen to, I was by myself and had seen an experienced man bail out injured that morning, the rain was as bad as I’d ever seen it, and I couldn’t sleep all night right before I was supposed to climb up two separate passes. The escape route was there, a bit more than 13 miles away, and I took it. The job had been left undone. Thus this scheme started by ripping off what I had missed.

  My first thought was to roar in and bang the bastard out in a long weekend. Hike up from Johnston Canyon to Mystic Junction, basically re-tracing my steps from my 2023 bail-out, then finish a couple days later in Lake Louise. Booked it, planned for it, then thought better of it. There are two main backpacking routes in this part of Banff National Park: the Sawback trail from Banff to Lake Louise, which I would be finishing, and the Sawback Loop, heading north from Mystic Creek toward Flint’s Park then westerly over Badger Pass to my old campsite at Badger Pass Junction. If I finished the Sawback Trail, retracing my steps from Johnston Creek to Badger Pass Junction, that entire trail on the opposite side of the Sawbacks was one I would probably never see. Besides, why would I walk between Larry’s Camp and Badger Pass Junction for a third time, or drag a backpack up Johnston Creek when I found the crowds maddening enough going downhill? And let’s be honest, going all the way to the Rockies for a two-night backpack is a bit of a waste…

  Therefore, I added a couple nights on to make a trail that I am calling the “Sawback hook,” where I hike up to Mystic Junction as I did in 2023, then continue up the rugged old hiker trail instead of turning towards Mystic Lake, catching the Sawbacks from their north side, seeing Sawback Lake, stopping at Baker Lake Junction, dragging my sorry carcass up Badger Pass (which is supposed to be real work), meeting up with my 2023 bailout point at Badger Pass Junction, and then finishing up through the Skoki to Lake Louise as planned. On the map for this scheme, my 2023 Sawback track is in blue, so as you can see these two years would net out to a very satisfying little shape³. This itinerary is more ambitious but also means I’ll have done every step of both the Sawback Loop and the Sawback Trail, admittedly in a somewhat unorthodox fashion that I wouldn’t have planned in cold blood.

  I am doing this a bit early in the year, and can expect a cornice going up Badger Pass that might be “interesting.” Well, better snow going up than down and if I die, I’ll let you know. If I don’t, though, I’ll have seen quite a lot of Banff National Park in the two summers. Not much north of the Skoki, though… which reminds me.

• August: Red Deer-Clearwater Circuit, Banff. This is the signature hike of 2024. 10 days and nearly a hundred miles sounds grand but there are a couple unglorious things about this big ol’ lollipop in north Banff. First, this is very much the trail I’m doing since I still can’t do Jasper’s North Boundary Trail. That’s become my white-whale hike, scuppered year after year by schedules, floods, always something⁴. Second, until last year the primary sources for information on this seldom-visited route was the patchwork of information in the Canadian Rockies Trail Guide and one ten-year-old PDF posted to the Canadian Rockies hiking blog, so it had an air of mystery, but since I started planning it at least two YouTubers, Howe’s the Hike and Marc of the Trail, knocked it off with a flourish. Stuart Howe hiked it in days less than I’ve scheduled. They both did the South Boundary Trail in Jasper ahead of me too, so probably I just have to live with it.

  For a 9-night backpack on unmaintained trail, the Red Deer-Clearwater has a reputation for not being that bad. It is considerably longer than the South Boundary Trail but a lot of that length is either over popular trail or relatively docile. There are several thrilling mountain passes, but the big ones come right at the beginning and right at the end. The South Boundary Trail had a cumulative climb of nearly 9,000 feet by my GPS in 75 miles; the grade on the Red Deer-Clearwater Circuit is therefore proportionate to my previous longest hike that seldom felt particularly steep. Camping for most of the trip is random, which gives pleasant flexibility, and there’s a bailout option halfway through at Ya-Ha-Tinda Ranch, which is definitely for emergencies only but carries the near-certainty of someone turning up to give you a ride to town eventually. Two people were killed by a grizzly bear on this trail last autumn, but tragic though that was, that was not particularly an objective threat to this trail. Mean old grizzlies are uncommon, and one of them was just shot dead.

  The real challenges here are the fords of the Pipestone and Clearwater Rivers, which can be very challenging and will kill you dead if you make a mistake, but it’s a hazard you have to face if you want to go far in the backcountry. In Jasper National Park, much is made of crossings that have been washed away and not maintained; there’s a whole controversy right now about Simon Creek to Athabasca Pass where the park is refusing a literal free bridge over a ford that is impassible on foot for all but a few weeks of the year. In Banff, the large designated wilderness zone seems to condition expectations so people seem to mind less (though the Pipestone crossing, as it happens, is not in the random zone, and is between the popular areas of Molar Pass and the Skoki).

  There are also a fair number of potential side trips in the first half of the journey, some of which could be camping destinations: lakes, a grand old bridge on the Cascade Fire Road, outfitter camps, and so on. I don’t usually do side trips, but I worked a few in the last couple years: Brazeau Lake and Luellen Lake were both campsites that took me out of my way, while last year I saw Owen Point on the West Coast Trail and Mystic Lake on the Sawback. I didn’t regret one of them. And as you see, it wouldn’t take a lot to bring this trip up to a very satisfying hundred miles. Weather and mood will be the guides.

  Other than that, objective threats include the usual perils of trails eaten by creeks and scattered with trees, loneliness, beautiful vast mountain vistas, a couple glorious passes, delicious creek water, natural history, pleasant challenges but not too many, and a good vacation. It seems like what I like.

  It just isn’t the North Boundary.

1. Neither the videos nor the blogs are short, either. Whether you think writing or videographing in the backcountry is harder, doing both is definitely hardest. They’re pretty good!
2. I could do a whole blog post on my transportation for this hike but who’d read it? Suffice to say there’s a lot going on.
3. Both 2023 and 2024 hikes start at Mt. Norquay and overlap as far as Mystic Junction where blue turns left. Some browsers show this on the map better than others.
4. Yes, I could hike out down the Moose River, but that’s supposed to be a miserable trail and frankly I want to see Berg Lake.