Pavement Ends
James Baughn was the webmaster of seMissourian.com and its sister newspapers for 20 years. On the side, he maintained even more sites, including Bridgehunter.com, LandmarkHunter.com, TheCapeRock.com, and Humorix. Baughn passed away in 2020 while doing one of the things he loved most: hiking in Southeast Missouri. Here is an archive of his writing about hiking and nature in our area.
Introducing the Pavement Ends Trip Planner Thingamajig
Posted Thursday, April 15, 2010, at 11:32 AM
I've been writing this blog for almost three years. Looking back through the archives, it's hard to keep track of the places that I have written about.
To keep my sanity, I've put together a database of hiking trails ranked by difficulty, trail length, and distance from Cape. You can browse the locations on a Google map, or click the "TABLE" tab to view everything as a sortable spreadsheet.
Here are what the fields mean:
Trail length: This is the estimated round-trip hiking distance necessary to explore the area properly. Shorter or longer trips are quite possible. As the old saying goes, your mileage may vary.
Hiking difficulty: Rated as Easy, Moderate, or Hard. This is geared for somebody like myself who isn't in the best shape. Experienced backpackers will find that "Hard" is actually "Easy"; the rest of us will be huffing and puffing. If a place is listed as "Don't know", it means I haven't been there yet.
There's no question that the trail at Little Grand Canyon in Illinois should be rated as "Hard"
Driving difficulty: Rating for the difficulty in navigating to the destination's parking lot or trailhead. Factors include the distance from Cape, the length of gravel or dirt roads, and the number of turnoffs with mediocre or missing signs. Some of the most difficult drives lead to regions where, from what I can tell, road signs haven't been invented yet.
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