“Map” is often listed as first essential on the hiker’s list of The Ten Essentials and you’ve got to have a map.

But not just any map. You need a good trail map, one designed for hikers.

I’ve supervised the making of more than a thousand trail maps, plain and fancy, simple and detailed. And I’ve reviewed thousands more as a backcountry traveler and an as an armchair traveler.

It was a Bad Idea Back in 1933

Ridiculous Proposal to Close California’s Parks
We've Been There, Done That

Increase the State Parks Budget: A Modest Proposal

Now is the time to purchase new California parklands not shut-down existing ones.

The Great Depression of the 1930s did not halt the state parkland acquisition program; in fact, the economic downturn accelerated it. Major parkland acquisitions would not have come about if housing construction and commercial real estate activity had been prospering. The state was able to purchase scenic gems at bargain-basement prices.

The Trailmaster has visited all 279 of them and is outraged by plans to close them.

I’ve visited each and every one of California’s state parks, all 279 of them.

Anza-Borrego Desert, Big Basin Redwoods, China Camp…

We super-size everything.

Except park budgets.

Views from our kitchen windows couldn’t have been more different. The north-facing window framed the Jesusita Fire, raging across the hills back of Santa Barbara in full, wind-whipped fury.

For the last 45 years or so Jesusita was known, if it was known at all, as a hiking trail. From the afternoon of Tuesday, May 5, and likely forever more, Jesusita will be known and remembered as a wildfire.

The Jesusita Fire burned some 160 structures and 8,733 acres before the stubborn blaze was finally put out two weeks after it began. Rarely is the name of a footpath affixed to a fire.

My inspiration for declaring this year “The Year of The Hiker” came from attending a stirring performance of a play by the same name during the waning days of The Year of the Rat (2008) at the Banshee Theater in Burbank.

John B. Keene’s The Year of the Hiker has been a classic in the playwright’s native Ireland ever since it debuted in the early 1960s, but is rarely staged in the United States.

The land we now call Sinkyone Wilderness State Park, located about 225 miles north of San Francisco, has long been recognized as something special. During the late 1960s, the great Catholic theologian, Thomas Merton, felt that the Needle Rock area would be an ideal place for a life of prayer and contemplation, and talked of establishing a monastic community there.

Adapted from A Walk Along Lands End: Discovering California's Living Coast (HarperCollins) by John McKinney. (In this excerpt, we join John in far northern California, some 1,400 miles into his 1,600-mile solo trek up the California coast.)

It doesn't get any wilder than this. California has a very long coastline, and millions of acres of wilderness, but it has only one wilderness coast. The Lost Coast.