- HIKING TRAILS AND WILDFLOWERS by Keith and Barbro McCree -
This guide covered all 90 of the trails in the area near the headwaters of the Willamette River in the western Oregon Cascades, and 160 of the wildflowers that we found on them. We lived in the area from 1990 to 2007, and became very familiar with the trails and wildflowers in it.
We rated all 90 trails for wildflowers. Our ratings were not subjective, but were based on a count of wildflower species. Sixteen trails achieved our highest rating ('Wildflower Special'), with a score of more than 60 species out of a possible 160. We also gave our overall rating as a hiking trail, on a scale of * to *****
In addition to the ratings, each trail page included a map, a grade profile (a graph of elevation against distance along the trail) , and a list of other users who were officially allowed to use the trail. Each wildflower page included the flower color, the habitat in which the plant could be found, when it bloomed, and how common it was in this area (with a map). There was a trails list for every wildflower, and a wildflower list for every trail, fully cross-linked to the trail and wildflower pages.
We included our collection of color slides of all the wildflowers, as well as about 80 of our slides of views from the trails, for a total of more than 300 color photographs.
The guide was fully interactive. It had thousands of 'hypertext links' like those that you are using to navigate this Web site. Instead of using a table of contents, you could just
The original 1990 version for Macintosh used the hypertext language HyperCard, which was invented by Bill Atkinson and first published by Apple Computer in 1987. This version had multiple-choice sorting of both trail cards and wildflower cards. You could use this feature to help you identify a wildflower. For example, you could sort the cards for plants with yellow flowers, blooming early in the season, and growing in dry, sunny places.
After the World Wide Web was invented by Tim Berners-Lee, we developed a Web-browser version that was compatible with both Macintosh and Windows operating systems. This version used HTML (HyperText Markup Language), which is less elegant than HyperCard but has some of the same hypertext features. It does not allow multiple-choice sorting of the data.
The guide was unique in the way that it linked the wildflowers to the trails on which you could find them. It was published as a CD-ROM to be read on a computer, not as a book. There must be hundreds of books on wildflowers, and many books on trails, but none that combine the two in this way. A book would have to contain thousands of pages to cover the information in our guide, and still would not be interactive.
We stopped publishing the guide when we moved out of the area.
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