Two years after a pandemic turns millions of people into feral Freakers, outlaw biker Deacon St. John rides central Oregon as a drifter and bounty hunter. He believes his wife Sarah died when a NERO helicopter lifted her out of the outbreak — until he learns she was moved to a military outpost at Crater Lake.
Days Gone's Oregon is a compressed, renamed version of the real high desert: Bend becomes Farewell, Black Butte Ranch becomes Iron Butte Ranch, and the militia holds Crater Lake. The route follows Deacon's ride from the opening evacuation to the volcanic lake where the story ends, through the hot springs, small towns and logging country that Bend Studio used as its model.
Three student teachers in Minneapolis wrote The Oregon Trail in two weeks in 1971 for a history class. Its 1985 Apple II version, set in 1848, became a staple of American classrooms — buying oxen, fording rivers, hunting buffalo and, all too often, dying of dysentery — and the series has sold more than 65 million copies. The game was built around real landmarks of the real trail, a 2,170-mile wagon route that some 400,000 emigrants travelled to Oregon and California, mostly between 1846 and 1869, across the homelands of many Native nations.
The route follows the game's stops from Missouri to the Willamette Valley, with what stands at each place today.
Max Caulfield comes back to the Oregon coast and finds a missing girl and a storm only she can see. In a Colorado mining town, Alex Chen arrives to meet the brother she barely knows, then stays to solve his death. Two Life is Strange games, two invented towns, and the real places their artists borrowed: a lighthouse, a main street, storefronts and a mountain valley.
The route follows the games in order, from Cape Meares and the Oregon towns behind Arcadia Bay to Idaho Springs, Georgetown, Nederland and Marble, the Colorado towns behind Haven Springs.
For eighteen months in 1860 and 1861, relays of light riders on fast horses carried letters 1,900 miles from the Missouri River to California. It took about ten days, was never profitable, and was made obsolete by the telegraph within a year and a half — yet it became one of the great legends of the Old West.
The route follows the mail west through eight places: the stables where the first rider set out, a surviving station in Kansas, Fort Kearny, Julesburg, the plains where Mark Twain saw a rider flash past his stagecoach, Utah, the Nevada desert and the terminus in Sacramento. Where legend (Buffalo Bill, Twain's eight days) outruns the record, the text says so.
In June 1995 Cheryl Strayed, 26 and with no hiking experience, set out alone to walk 1,100 miles of the Pacific Crest Trail. Her memoir Wild reached No. 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list, and Reese Witherspoon played her in the 2014 film.
This route follows the hike north from the Mojave Desert to the Columbia River, using the memoir's outline and the film's best-known scenes. The film compresses and dramatises, so stops drawn from it say so, and pins mark areas rather than campsites.
