I'm not sure I understand the question: "Do place names show hikes in a specific radius?" Are you talking about the orange dots on the map? They correspond to a single hike.
That is annoying that the map doesn't remember where you were. Seems like the best way to handle that is to store your last location in localstore.
Ah got it. At the moment, it would tell you that there are no hikes named "Seattle", since search only works on the name of the hike.
When I add support for searching by location (because this seems to be a popular request), then I think it should zoom you into the location, enough so that you could see all of Seattle. I think this can be done with google's jsapi / google maps but I'm going to have to investigate.
That is annoying that the map doesn't remember where you were. Seems like the best way to handle that is to store your last location in localstore.