Think You Need a Car to Get to the Best Hiking Spots? You're Wrong
Transit trekking evangelist Kim Huntress-Inskeep's trying to make transit-to-trails a thing. It's working.
After one bus, one train, two different intercity cycle paths, seven days, and approximately 400 miles, Kim Huntress-Inskeep was exhausted. New York City to Pittsburgh is usually no big deal, but in 2012 she and her partner decided to skip the airport, eschew a rental car, and take the train the opposite direction to Washington DC—all before bikepacking up to the Steel City.
“I was like, ‘We’re not biking for like a week. I don’t want to ride my bike anymore,'” she remembers.
Instead of a triumphant last lap to her friend’s wedding venue, the couple took the bus. But that also became an important journey for Huntress-Inskeep; it was the first in what would become a lifetime of car-free outdoor adventures. In 2021, she started a blog on accessing the outdoors in Washington State using only transit (and occasionally a bicycle) that consists of a combination of crowdsourced info, meticulous research into regional transit maps and timetables, plus her own personal adventures.
While she is by no means the first person to engage in “transit hiking”—her blog’s resources page is full of state-specific webpages, ancient transit-to-trails PDF maps, international transit hiking nonprofits, and local meetup groups—she is one of the concept’s loudest evangelists. And having completed “countless” day trips, “about three dozen” multi-day backpacking trips, and four epic “trips of a lifetime” (plus a couple equally epic failures) spanning several states and at least two countries, she's also quite possibly one of the most well-traveled transit hikers alive. She even does multi-day backpacking trips using only the bus.
These days, she’s known around Seattle as the Transit Trekker.
It’s a gray, chilly, and intermittently rainy Tuesday, and Huntress-Inskeep and I are—with the exception of one brave woman enjoying a 9 am cold plunge—the only people at the Dockton Marina on Puget Sound’s Vashon-Maury Island. I lived on this island for nearly three years yet can’t recall a single time I was at the marina before noon.
Now 55, Huntress-Inskeep looks like any other semi-active Seattleite, favoring a blue Patagonia jacket, warm leggings, hiking boots, and breathable shirts straight from the sale rack at REI. In a city where everyone looks like they’re about to do a six-mile day hike, lugging a trekking pole around town means she fits right in. But while our short jaunt around the Maury Island Marine Park is not exactly what you’d call challenging, what she’s doing is in an entirely different category than what your ordinary Arcteryx-clad Pacific Northwesterner gets up to. Rather, she’s exploring one of the last real frontiers left in America: car-free outdoor recreation.
From the parking lot of the marina, we cross to a gravel pullout where a modest, barely noticeable trailhead transports us away from the traffic noise of tardy commuters and into the deep stillness of Dockton Forest. From there, we hike to the top of what I’ve always called the Gravel Pit, a decommissioned gravel mine that is now one of the region’s best beach hikes—and best kept secrets. Instead of descending down among the old mining conveyors to the beach, we continue along the upper portion, through a large stand of madronas and past what would be the indisputable best view of Mount Rainier, if only the mountain wasn’t obscured by fog.
I still can’t believe we got here on a bus.
Huntress-Inskeep grew up in exurban San Diego, where contact with the outside world required her to hike down the long, winding dirt driveway from her father’s property to the nearest bus stop. “I literally walked uphill both ways to get to the bus stop to go to high school,” she jokes.
She later moved to New York without having ever visited; all she knew was that she could live there without a car. After moving back to Seattle in 2015 with her partner Rod, she began work on the Transit Trekker Manual. Today, its table of contents contains almost 300 pages of individual treks, spanning nine regions across Washington State and 16 subregions. Some of them are crowdsourced, but the vast majority are hikes or overnights that Huntress-Inskeep has been on herself. “My job has to be to communicate the advantages of transit trekking, but as somebody who can't drive because I've never had a driver's license, it's actually work, because the benefits seem so obvious to me,” she says.
Not to overemphasize the obvious, but she gets out there.
“I took the ferry to catch the Strait Shot to Port Angeles,” she says, trying to remember the many legs of a more notable journey that took place during the infamous 2021 heat dome. “I got a cheap motel room overnight, which didn't have air conditioning—I found that out when I got there. Got up the next morning at like, five, to catch the bus to Forks to catch the bus to La Push. I got off at Morrow Road and hiked five miles to the Rialto trailhead.”
In short, she spent a few days “chilling out and enjoying the breeze” at Rialto Beach—easily one of the most stunning of Washington’s many rocky Pacific beaches—while the rest of us roasted.
Another one of her more memorable hikes was a 2022 trek on bus and foot to Dosewallips State Park that involved a thick blanket of December snow.
She again set out from the Bainbridge Island Ferry Terminal, but this time traveled via local buses instead of the more direct Strait Shot. Her destination was Port Townsend, itself one of the Olympic Peninsula’s most idyllic destination towns, chock full of cute shops and quaint Victorian homes. However, besides a stop at her favorite local business, Better Living Through Coffee, she was hellbent on having a week to herself in a primitive cabin. The local bus she needed to reach her final destination skipped her stop.
Still, she was undeterred. Transit trekkers can usually expect a few hiccups—that's all part of the fun.
“I’d delayed my trip by a day already and I wasn’t going to let a few minutes of possibly having to walk on the shoulder of Highway 101 stop me from enjoying my planned week of respite and work,” she wrote in a blog post about the trip. After an undeniably dicey walk along the shoulder of the highway, she was rewarded with a week of solitude in one of Washington’s most scenic state parks.
Huntress-Inskeep can easily rattle off several sound arguments in favor of others leaving their cars at home, too. Taking transit to natural areas offers one other major advantage over driving: You don’t have to keep your eyes on the road. Instead, you can enjoy all the natural beauty available to you, something she urged her readers to do in a recent post outlining five of her favorite Seattle-area scenic transit trips. There’s also the simple convenience of not having to worry about parking or the cost of fuel.
Beyond that, driving is, of course, dangerous. According to National Park Service data, 668 people died in motor vehicle crashes in national parks between 2007 and 2023. Only drowning killed more visitors. While those numbers could include people riding on buses, the National Safety Council reports that a person is 20 times more likely to die in a crash in a passenger vehicle than on a bus. Then, there’s the environmental impact: “Tires are terrible for salmon,” she says. “That affects the entire food chain, including orcas. And I don't think I know a single person who doesn't regard orcas with awe.”
Anna Zivarts, a longtime personal friend and the director of Disability Rights Washington’s Disability Mobility Initiative, where Huntress-Inskeep was a fellow, tells me there was definitely a need for better accessibility in most of the country’s outdoor offerings. Zivarts lives with low vision and cannot drive. In New York City, where the two met, Zivarts had no trouble accessing the outdoors. There were hourly buses, and Metro-North stops Upstate. “Whereas, here, it’s a lift,” she says.
The Transit Trekker Manual could help lighten that load, Zivarts said, by cajoling policymakers and parks departments into including more information on accessibility on their websites, and even making improvements to the physical spaces in parks. They could find a lot of that info in Huntress-Inskeep’s book, whose entries include extremely detailed information about everything from the grade of trails to whether or not there are restrooms and whether or not those restrooms are ADA compliant. Where most places providing information about the outdoors assume that people in wheelchairs simply aren’t interested in going hiking, Huntress-Inskeep’s guides assume not only that they are, but that they deserve to be able to do it as comfortably and safely as possible.
Beyond disability rights, there’s also the matter of racial equity, something the outdoor recreation sector has never been known for. According to the National Equity Atlas, in 2020, 18% of Black households did not have access to a car, compared to just 6% of white households. While there are other very valid reasons Black families tend to be excluded from outdoor activities, difficulty in getting there is certainly a factor.
Jessica Pitre-Williams, a Black woman who, along with her six-year-old son, joined Huntress-Inskeep on a trek last November, is not part of that 18%. However, she prefers to drive as little as possible, and was thrilled to discover a new way to access the outdoors sans car. While the Transit Trekker blog wasn’t solely responsible for getting Pitre-Williams on the trail—she’d previously used and enjoyed King County Metro’s (KCM) Trailhead Direct bus service—she believes that resources like it had the potential to improve Black participation in outdoor activities. She also believes paper flyers might be a better way to reach people who aren’t on the computer all day for work.
“You need to advertise where people are,” she says.
While our hike extends into the Maury Island Marine Park, one of the largest undeveloped shorelines in Washington State, Huntress-Inskeep becomes increasingly animated, outlining big transit trek plans. She has her sights set on a multimodal Alaska trip that would begin on Amtrak, switch to the famous Alaska Marine Highway (where travelers camp on the deck of a ferry for days at a time), and conclude in Denali National Park, before doing the whole route in reverse, of course. The way she sees it, while there are some places that are simply impossible to get to without a car, the ones that you can get to via transit are big enough to spend a lifetime in.
Ultimately, I’m a little embarrassed that as an avid COVID-era Vashon day-hiker, I hadn’t taken transit once to the same hike I’d been on almost 50 times. I wouldn’t have even had to take the foot ferry, let alone the bus to get to it. She made a trip to the south shore of Maury Island look easy even coming from the mainland—we were back downtown by 2 pm. But while weekend warriors like myself might admire her dogged dedication to the (bus) route less traveled, she’s quick to shrug off applause.
“I do have a problem embracing the cool factor,” she says. "It's my reality, so I've never thought about it that way before."