A daily 20-mile hike up hills and across sand strips of the Oregon Coast is just a day’s work for Al LePage.

People around here might remember LePage as the cheerful impersonator of  pioneer explorer Jedediah Smith. He hiked in Smith’s footsteps through this area eight years ago.

 He’s back.

In fact, you might see him strolling into North Bend this morning. Then he’ll take a jaunt along Pony Slough through town and over to John Topits Park, and ultimately out to Cape Arago.

He’ll follow a little-known 4.5-mile historic pathway through town, as part of his 400-mile journey down the Oregon Coast Trail. This tiny trail was the first sawmill pathway that led from a mill, once at the south end of the McCullough Bridge, to the Empire Boat Ramp area.

“It was actually recorded on a map that I just stumbled across by accident at the Oregon Historical Society eight years ago,” LePage said.

He noticed the trail passed by three tiny lakes. In matching a transparency of the map to modern-day geography, he discovered a section follows an existing trail through John Topits Park.

LePage is the executive director of the National Coast Trail Association. He’s   on a mission to promote development of a Oregon Coast Legacy Plan. LePage is using his down-the-coast jaunt, which started July 14 and ends Aug. 12, as a way to learn about how the coast trail has changed. Then he wants Oregonians involved in the legacy plan to choose how best to preserve it.  

“I tell people when I’m hiking I’m actually at work and they laugh,” he said. “And then I give them my card.”

On Thursday, LePage set off south from Florence on what would be a 24-mile hike to the mouth of the Umpqua River.

The beginning was incredibly beautiful, he said. He met people on the beach. There was an Italian/German couple in their 70s who walk the beach. Later in the day, he met a wildlife biologist out working.

“You’d think 24 miles of dunes would drive you crazy, but there are so many things to see,” he said.

The patterns in the sand. A beached sea lion.

At about mile 18, he hit the wall, as they say. It was psychologically brutal, but he made it.

“I’m in my sleeping bag at the mouth of the Umpqua River. It’s warm and overcast,” he said in a cell phone interview Friday morning.

Five minutes later, a squall moved in. It started drizzling. He rolled up his sleeping bag and headed south to camp Friday night at the south end of the Oregon Dunes near Horsfall Beach. But a little rain couldn’t drown his enthusiasm for the date with the tiny trail at North Bend.

“It’s a crucial missing link in the trail through an urban area,” he said. “There’s no other place along the whole coast that has an urban trail linkage like that.”