About me

Trails & Tunes is a Pacific Northwest storytelling project built on songs, hikes, and wide-ranging curiosity.

Created by songwriter and filmmaker Luke Borsten, each episode turns a trail, landscape, conservation story, or piece of regional history into an original song and on-location video. The goal is simple: help people feel more connected to the places around them — and more curious about how those places came to be.

A trail is never just a trail. It can be a story about geology, ecology, public policy, Indigenous history, land use, wildfire, flooding, logging, restoration, recreation, or the long, complicated ways people and landscapes have shaped each other over time.

Trails & Tunes follows that wonder wherever it leads: from old-growth forests and lava flows to urban growth boundaries, wildflower meadows, working farms, public lands, and forgotten corners of Oregon and Washington. Each song begins with research — books, articles, interviews, maps, field notes, and rabbit holes — then becomes a short, shareable piece of music meant to make complex place-based stories easier to remember, talk about, and care about.

Luke isn’t a scientist or a traditional journalist. He’s a songwriter, video editor, and lifelong Oregonian using music as a doorway into deeper learning. Trails & Tunes exists for anyone who has ever wondered: Who protected this place? What happened here? Why does this landscape look the way it does? What lives here, what changed here, and what might happen next?

Welcome to a new way of examining the Pacific Northwest.