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A journey connecting Seattle’s major public stairways, neighborhoods, parks and green spaces.
A journey connecting Seattle’s major public stairways, neighborhoods, parks and green spaces.
Created 2014 · Revived 2026
treehugger is a place where I “reimagine ecological restoration,” and I've devoted episodes to people's relationships with urban nature and urban ecosystems. The Seattle Stairway Foot Tour is a much earlier version of my interest in how people inhabit urban landscapes.
The Foot Tour began with a fairly simple and slightly ridiculous idea: What if you connected Seattle’s biggest public stairways into one continuous journey through the city?
I was living in Seattle at the time, running to work, running ultramarathons, and spending a lot of my free time exploring the city on foot. I wanted an option when I couldn't get to the mountains. I desired elevation, but I wanted route that wasn't simply about climbing stairs for exercise. I wanted to use the stairways to connect neighborhoods, parks, green spaces, shorelines, trails and pieces of the city I might otherwise never encounter together. I also kind of wanted a brutal urban ultra.
The result was the Seattle Stairway Foot Tour, a roughly 100-kilometer route around Seattle.
It was never really a race. Run the whole thing. Walk it over several days. Pick a neighborhood section. Get distracted and change the route. The stairways are always there...until they aren't.
the foot tour
the foot tour
The route connects Seattle's major public stairways , those with 100 or more stairs , into one long, meandering trip around the city.
Starting near Puget Sound in West Seattle, the original route travels roughly counterclockwise through:
West Seattle → Duwamish Valley → Beacon Hill → Rainier Valley → Mount Baker → Central Seattle → Downtown → Capitol Hill → Montlake → University District → Ravenna → Fremont → Magnolia → Queen Anne
The surviving original GPX is approximately 65 miles / 105 kilometers.
But mileage was never really the point.
Seattle's stairways are pedestrian infrastructure. Some are beautiful and prominent; others are utilitarian, overgrown, tucked between houses or easy to walk past without noticing. I came to think of them as vertical sidewalks. They are infrastructure that helps people negotiate a city built on hills.
The Foot Tour uses them as connective tissue for exploring Seattle at human speed.
Original route files & data - hehe, this is like 2015-vintage tech folks....
Original Route Guide - thank Gaia for the webarchive
go explore
go explore
The Seattle Stairway Foot Tour was never intended to be a formal race course. Think of it as an invitation to explore.
Run the whole thing. Walk it over several days. Pick a neighborhood section. Take transit between sections. Get distracted and change the route. Most importantly, make it your own.
Original route files & data - hehe, this is like 2015-vintage tech folks....
View the Google Map (also below)
DOWNLOAD THE ORIGINAL GPX
A note before you go: This is an archived adventure route, not a maintained or marked course. The original route was developed more than a decade ago, and Seattle has changed. Construction, trails, stairways, street crossings, public access and pedestrian conditions may have changed too. I don't even live there anymore....
A line appearing on the old map or GPX does not guarantee that a connection is currently open, public or safe. Check current conditions, respect closures and private property, stay on public rights-of-way and established public trails, and use designated crossings where available. Bring the navigation, food, water and equipment appropriate for whatever portion you undertake.
The stairways are always there. Explore them at your own pace.
where it came from
where it came from
The Seattle Stairway Foot Tour didn't appear out of nowhere.
Seattle already had a small community of people finding, inventorying, walking and advocating for its public stairways. Doug Beyerlein, Susan Ott Ralph and David Ott, and Jake and Cathy Jaramillo did much of the work that made an adventure like this possible. I adopted Doug's definition of a "major" public stairway: 100 or more continuous stairs as one of the basic rules of the Foot Tour. Doug had posted the stairway points in a now-defunct website Community Walks. Doug was also a connoissouer of Public Stairways around the world.
There was also Yitka Winn, the ever-so-fast & infamous Seattle mountain runner. Not long after moving to Seattle, I came across her 2010 Outdoors NW story, "Mission accomplished! Seattle's 525 staircases ascended," about a group of friends who had systematically worked their way through the city's public stairs. I was running and biking around the city at the time and remember thinking: I live near stairs | I use stairs | I could do something like that. I later met Yitka biefly at the Vashon Island Ultramarathon and discovered that Seattle Mountain Running Group member Craig Foster had been part of that earlier stairway crew.
Meanwhile, another kind of urban adventure was developing in Los Angeles. The Inman 300 connected hundreds of public stairways into an enormous urban thru-hike. Liz "Snorkel" Thomas wrote about walking it in 2013. Honestly, thru-hiking urban areas started with Liz as far as I am concerned.
Andrew Lichtman helped connect that LA stair culture with what I was doing in Seattle. Andrew and I spent time talking and walking together. Magically, he had family in Seattle and made time to walk with us. And his experience helped me think less about creating one big run and more about making a route that other people could navigate and reinterpret themselves. That was really the idea.
I started doing what I called Stair Recons: running around Seattle scouting stairways and trying to figure out how they could be connected. In 2014, Andrew and Vivian Doorn covered more than 50 miles of the Foot Tour over two days while Jean-Michel Fouard and I pushed through 55 miles in a day. The following year, here comes Kelly Wiley Lane. She circumnavigated an even longer loop around Seattle's stairways over several days of commuting and hiking, only weeks after completing the Inman 300. She was exploring her own way.
The ideas kept moving. Liz Thomas later returned to Seattle for her own urban thru-hike and used the Seattle Stairway Foot Tour as one of the sources for developing her route that encompassed ALL the stairs (big and small) in Seattle.
And after I moved to Tacoma, the Foot Tour kept going without me. Steven Kent and Alex Swanson completed the full Celestial Edition in 2015. Martin Criminale, who had run part of that attempt, revived the Foot Tour himself on the summer solstice in 2018 and completed it with Bryan Estes. Six people started; Eric Bone was among them and apparently navigated the route brilliantly from a printed map, without relying on technology. Julie Cassata joined with under ten miles remaining.
In 2020, another group picked it up during the pandemic and expanded the concept into a roughly 100-mile journey connecting even more of Seattle's major stairways.
That's probably my favorite part of the history. None of these routes really belongs to one person. They're built from public infrastructure, accumulated knowledge, maps, conversations and other people's adventures. Someone walks a stairway and records it. Someone else puts it on a map. Somebody wonders what happens if you connect it to the next one. Then somebody else takes the map and keeps walking.
the celestial edition
the celestial edition
We held the Foot Tour on the summer solstice, starting around sunrise and taking advantage of nearly as much daylight as Seattle provides.
The first attempt in 2014 covered about 55 miles, 66 major stairways and 9,577 stair steps, with 8,167 feet of elevation gain. We didn't finish the planned route.
We tried again in 2015.
People joined and departed throughout the day. Friends and family appeared around Seattle with food and water. My dad operated a mobile aid station while playing his limited collection of '80s CDs. We ate an entire watermelon in Interlaken Park. My GPS died. People got lost.
I stopped after about 50 miles when my back and foot started telling me that continuing was a bad idea. The others kept going into Seattle Stair Country.
Steven Kent and Alex Swanson ultimately completed the entire 2015 route: 68.2 miles with 10,198 feet of elevation gain in 17 hours and 22 minutes.
At 10:37 that night Steven messaged me because they thought they had reached the finish but had overshot the coordinates at Galer St, Queen Anne. I was asleep on the south side of QA where I lived. I jumped in the car and picked them up. We made the (seriously the best feeling) Vashon ferry in the nick of time. That was the Seattle Stairway Foot Tour.
READ: INTO SEATTLE STAIR COUNTRY - 2015
it took a village of weirdos
it took a village of weirdos
The Foot Tour grew partly out of the Seattle Mountain Running Group community. Not everyone shared my enthusiasm for spending an entire day running on pavement, but enough people did - friends and acquaintences - that I have spent hours on the road or tail with over the years.
Doug Beyerlein helped lay the intellectual groundwork and ran portions of the route. Martin Criminale ran, photographed and documented the adventure. Steven Kent and Alex Swanson carried the 2015 edition all the way to the finish. Jean-Michel Fouard, Ryan McKnight, Genia Kasey-McKnight, John Lumb, Brian Landau, Shikha Jain and others joined portions of the journey.
Friends and family provided food, water, transportation, encouragement and occasional rescue. Seven Hills Running Shop in Magnolia was always a beacon of light.
And the Foot Tour continued after I moved away.
Other runners and walkers have revisited, adapted and expanded the route over the years. That's exactly what I hoped would happen. Back in 2015 I wrote that I wanted people to be able to take the guide and map and “set off on their own adventures at their leisure.”
So, thank you to everyone who mapped, documented, scouted, ran, walked, photographed, fed, encouraged, got lost on or otherwise helped keep this weird thing alive.
want more stairs? the Big round
want more stairs? the Big round
The original Foot Tour doesn't connect every major public stairway in Seattle. A handful of outliers would have required substantial additional (flat) mileage. These stairways lie in deep SE, NE, and NW portions of the city.
Naturally, that led to another idea: the Big Round. The concept was to add those outlying stairways and push the route toward 100 miles.
Years later, other runners picked up the Foot Tour and developed an approximately 102-mile variation, breaking it into manageable sections and connecting additional major stairways.
I'm preserving that variation here as part of the evolving history of the route rather than treating any one line on a map as definitive.
[EXPLORE THE ~102-MILE VARIATION]
from the archive
from the archive
The original Foot Tour was scattered across the very 2010s collection of WordPress posts, spreadsheets, Google Maps, KMZ files, GPX tracks, Facebook events and Google Earth screenshots that somehow constituted an adventure platform at the time. Some of it survives.
Original Seattle Stairway Foot Tour
The original route guide, preserved by the Internet Archive.
Read the original route guide
Into Seattle Stair Country — July 4, 2015
My account of the 2015 Celestial Edition. Into Seattle Stair Country
Read the original story
Seattle Stairway Foot Tour Map
The original interactive Google My Map.
Explore the map
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