Oregon Coast Trail Story Map

Update: the story map doesn’t work on ohines now (or at least my android). Why does tech need to get obsolete so fast???? 😖.

Speaking of the Oregon Coast Trail (see my recent post), some of you who have been with me for years will remember the story map I built in the painful wake of my first injuries and prior to my cancer diagnosis.

In October of 2024, when I realized that I would not be hiking the Oregon Coast Trail, I decided to go ahead and do it anyway, but from home. I would embark on a pretend journey and imagine that I was out plodding through the sand and feeling the rain sting my cheeks in groves of old-growth trees that rim the bluffs over the Pacific Ocean. I would virtually hike the Oregon Coast Trail.

This creative endeavor was my attempt at keeping sane in the new insanity of my body…and you can see that as the days progress in the story map.

My process that month was to wake up early each morning, read the guidebook (shout out to Bonnie Henderson and her excellent resource), reference the FarOut app for real-time updates from other hikers, study the weather, decide how many miles to walk, where I would camp or find lodging, where I would eat, what interesting things I’d see during the day, and how I would navigate the many gaps in the trail. I wanted to turn the virtual hike into a visual journey as well, so I created the story map by publishing each new day on the platform as I would on an actual thru-hike. The Oregon Coast Trail is a logistical mélange of hazards like high tides, which make certain sections un-doable, or eroding cliffs from a perpetually stormy sea. I wanted to experience those hazards, even if remotely, and decide how I would proceed if I were actually there.

Story mapping had become another passion by this point, and over the past few years, I had been creating them professionally for other organizations. The medium harkened back to my college days where I dove into multi-media projects, combining images with prose, sounds, and even videos.

By the second week, my creative act had become oppressive, given the sheer amount of time it was taking me to create each day’s exploration. The added weight of my painful body didn’t make things much easier. After my morning creation, my days were filled with appointments. They ranged from sessions with a physical therapist, massage therapist, chiropractor, acupuncturist, and my primary care doctor, with little result. I could barely move.

I kept going because that’s what I do, and I finished the project on October 31, 2024 to mirror when I would have finished in real time.

Because the story map software is constantly undergoing changes, I’m not sure how long this project will be available (the version I used to create this has already been discontinued), so check it out if you are interested: