Get online and get outdoors
Where to find it: Trail Journals www.trailjournals.com.
Who runs the site: Trail Journals is a commercial site, but the
advertising is low key.
Get online and get outdoors
Where to find it: Trail Journals www.trailjournals.com.
Who runs the site: Trail Journals is a commercial site, but the advertising is low key.
The site’s home page provides the best explanation of what it’s all about: “This site is designed to unite journal writers with journal readers. We currently have 198,608 journal entries, with over 2,238,457 miles of hiking, 261,541 trail photos, and 1,118 hikers in our directory.”
Who is likely to use the site: Armchair adventurers are sure to be attracted to the site’s tales of epic hikes, but the site’s real target audience is those who are looking to lace up a pair of trail runners and cover a few thousand miles in a summer. The tips about homemade ultralight equipment alone make the site well worth a visit. How about a 1-ounce stove made from an old soft drink can?
Pros: Trail Journals offers a look at great adventures as they happen. The subculture of “through-hikers,” people who seek to cover the entire length of one of the world’s greatest pathways in a season, is something many of us are unaware of. In North America, the marqee trails are the Appalachian, the Continental Divide, and the Pacific Crest. By comparison, the 213-mile John Muir Trail is an amble in the park.
The journals range from workmanlike and practical to lyrical and literate. Most walkers file updates whenever they return to civilization, using hand-held pocketmail devices. The photos they post are stunning, and the photographs walkers post are often the stuff postcards are made of.
The tips alone offer priceless insights for anyone who ever dreamed of going native. There are recipes for 1-pound tents, for backpacks that use a sleeping pad for a frame, for high-calorie trail food and for sleeping systems that are cheap and effective. Through hikers often cover up to 30 miles per day, burning 5,000 calories or more in the process. Food is a very big topic on this site.
Cons: Because the site is all about walking in the wilderness, it tends to slow down in the fall and winter months. Come January, walkers will begin posting their pre-trip journals. The preparation details – training hikes, trips to REI and the like – tend to get pretty tiresome. The real action starts in April, when most through hikers launch their adventures.
There’s a subculture among through-hikers that some might find to be kind of geeky. Typically, through-hikers adopt trail names, nicknames based on a trait or sheer whimsy. They attract their own band of groupies, people who leave food and beverages along the trail, or who house hikers and offer free showers and laundry services. Their kindnesses are known as “trail magic.”
With entries closing in on the 200,000 mark, the site can become a serious time vampire.
