Until I find some way to keep my day job (I am a Senior Research Scientist at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory) from interfering with my hiking I have to use a type of triage to ration my work on this web site. One implication of this is that at any given time a trail description can have any one of the following statuses:

Annotated: I have collected images while hiking the trail and have used these pictures to annotate my comments.

Summarized: I have summarized observations from multiple sources. These sources may include my own experiences from hiking in the Cascades before I started to collect formalized notes and pictures for inclusion in this web site.

Planned: While I have summarized information for a trail I have not yet hiked the trail to collect images. I hope to collect them in the ‘near’ future.

Extracted: I have extracted information directly from public domain literature for the convenience of the reader. For example, many of the descriptions of the Alpine Lake trails , which I do not expect to have the opportunity to hike unless I win the lottery, are taken verbatim from the public domain Cle Elum Ranger District Trail Guide .