Well, those Our Hike gals splashed in the waters of the Pacific Ocean yesterday, meaning they’ve completed their coast to coast hike of the American Discovery Trail. It was an auspicious date, coming on the one-year anniversary of the birth of Two-Heel Drive.

In case you were wondering how I came up with the name, it was like this: A little over a year ago I was thinking of starting a blog about hiking, but the main snag was what to call it. Ideally it would be clever, catchy and difficult to pronounce. So one day last October, I was trudging up a gratingly steep grade along the Ohlone Wilderness Trail and it occurred to me how handy it’d be to have a four-wheel drive vehicle. Just my luck, I thought in my exertion-induced haze, to be seven miles from the nearest internal combustion engine with nothing but my two-heel drive method of propulsion.

It helps to know that I write headlines for a living and one of the ways we amuse ourselves in this line of work is to craft twists on familiar phrases. Example: I used “liner notes” the other day for a story about world’s largest cruise ship. Cute, eh? So when “two-heel drive” came into my brain, I knew I had my blog’s title. It turns out that it’s almost impossible to convey this title orally without having to place ridiculous emphasis on the “heel” — which is good because it discourages me from boring my co-workers to death with tales of my hiking-blogging misadventures (I want them alive because otherwise I’d have to do all their work).

In case you’re wondering why I post all my hike write-ups at my homepage, Busy Being Born: I created this site to be a window on hiking-related content on the Web, not to validate my own exeriences. I already have someplace to write about my hikes; Two-Heel Drive is about everybody else’s.

Feedback from readers is the fuel that keeps me going in this enterprise. As long as people continue to show an interest, I’ll keep on posting.