As John McKinney puts it: “I’ve been blessed to have had the opportunity to take a hike and write about it in many great places in North America, Europe, and elsewhere around the world.”

John McKinney, The Traveling Hiker, knows the best way to experience a place is by sojourning on foot. From the mountains of Maui to the Lake District in England, the inveterate walker shares his enthusiasm for traveling—and enjoying the best hiking along the way.

An expert on hiking tours, guided and self-guided hiking vacations, John McKinney has designed and led tours for a walking vacation company. “Leading a hiking tour is a demanding but very rewarding experience,” he says. “You get to know people really well when you spend time with them on the trail in a beautiful place.”

“Vancouver is one of the world’s best cities for hiking because the wilderness is right in our backyards,” declares Manfred Schollerman, owner-operator of Rockwood Adventures, a walking tour company. “A twenty minute walk takes you from city streets into a rain forest with thousand-year old trees.”

Asian and European visitors, whose cities are far, far from any wilderness, are particularly awestruck by the close proximity of the forest primeval to civic center, explains Schollerman. Indeed his most popular jaunt, the Capilano River Canyon Walk begins near a shopping center and almost before his walkers can say “banana slug,” they find themselves in a temperate rain forest. Trails weave through an emerald forest of hemlock, red cedar and Douglas fir, over a forest floor carpeted with moss, ferns and flowering plants.

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.

As you hike up to the top of Kelso Dunes you might just find that the dunes sha-boom, sha-boom, sha-boom for you. Geologists speculate that the extreme dryness of the East Mojave Desert, combined with the wind-polished, rounded nature of the individual sand grains, has something to do with their musical ability.

Except for the sha-booming dunes, the Kelso Dunes are absolutely quiet. Often hikers find they have a 45-square-mile formation of magnificently sculpted sand, the most extensive dune field in the West, all to themselves.

After years of restoration efforts, Kelso Depot Information Center is now open. The historic depot, which once served as a train station, lunch room and employee dormitory has been transformed into Mojave National Preserve’s chief information center.

Death Valley National Park? The Forty-niners, whose suffering gave the valley its name, would have howled at the notion. “Death Valley National Park” seems a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron of the great outdoors.