"milestone toward" is a perfectly valid phrase in written English.
It is typically used to indicate the progress made toward a goal or achievement of some kind. For example, "We have reached a milestone toward completing the project on time."
Monday was a milestone toward that target.
"The conclusion of demolition with the dropping of the water tower marks a historic milestone toward achieving our goal".
"This monetization of patents is another major milestone toward successful emergence," Antonio M. Perez, Kodak's chief executive, said in a news release.
In awarding the Nobel Prize to Professor Huxley and Professor Hodgkin, the Karolinska Institute in Sweden called their discovery a "milestone" toward understanding electrical stimulation of nerve cells.
The church's 265th pope, Benedict was the first German to hold the title in half a millennium, and his election was a milestone toward Germany's spiritual renewal 60 years after World War II and the Holocaust.
Harrison E. Salisbury, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting in Moscow for The New York Times in the 1950s, called the book "a milestone toward the understanding of three-quarters of a century of Russian trauma".
Under the terms of the contract, the remaining payments will be spread out over the next several years, presumably timed to coincide with various milestones toward the manuscript's completion.
But rather than measuring them as milestones toward inevitable decline and demise, why not use them to sustain our health?
The tentative agreement, which was struck in Switzerland on Thursday after marathon negotiations went beyond a March 30 deadline and into overtime, is a milestone step toward the passage of a comprehensive accord by the end of June.
When I look behind, as I am compelled to look before I can gather strength to proceed on my journey, I see the milestones dwindling toward the horizon and the slow fires trailing from the abandoned campsites, over which scavenger angles wheel on heavy wings.
Ms. Addario spent most of Monday at Kasturba Hospital with Sruthi Gottipati, a reporter for the India Ink blog of The Times, who wrote about the impact of the milestone on attention toward infant health in India.
