Hello friends! In the past 18 months, we have published more than 60 trail profiles, from simple overnights to 1,000-mile epics in every region of the country. All of our routes follow a detailed format and include downloadable GPX files, and all have been hiked by the person who wrote the profile. We’re really thrilled to be able to offer this resource to the community, and we love spending our time on it. Here’s more about our site, and some details on the team.
In a continued effort to hire writers for more trail profiles (and to pay them!) into 2022, we’re currently raising funds for our first six trail profiles of the year. To keep the site running and get content through for the first half of the year, we need to raise $1,000.
We have two main reasons for fundraising.
1) Our Editorial Integrity Means Fewer Affiliate Links
We are proud of our editorial integrity and value-driven content, which is why you won’t see roundups like “The Best Technology-Oriented Backpacking Gifts for 5’6″ Brunettes Who Enjoy The Color Pink” flooding your news feed in a desperate bid for affiliate clicks. It’s also why we haven’t gotten into Truck Modification Content and suspiciously targeted Toyota Tacoma ads. While we do have some affiliate links, we try not to push it too hard, which means we need other means of making dollars.
2) We Pay Our Writers
Exposure doesn’t pay the bills! All three of our cofounders make some sort of income from writing, and all three of them have had to weigh the pros and cons of writing for free for the exposure and hope for the portfolio boost over, you know, eating dinner that night. So while we probably could rope people into writing trail profiles fOr ExPoSuRe, we won’t.
Through polls, feedback, and general industry intuition, we came up with the following trails. We’re hoping to hire writers and publish these over the next six months:
- The Ice Age Trail, Wisconsin (1,200 miles)
- Ozark Highland Trail, Arkansas (218 miles)
- The Enchantments, Washington (20 miles)
- Old Loggers Path, Pennsylvania (26 miles)
- Eagle Rock Loop, Arkansas (26 miles)
- Dolly Sods Wilderness, West Virginia (mileage varies)
These are bound to change in some way or another, but you get the gist. We aim for a variety of locations and distances, favoring loops for the logistical simplicity. We are trying to fill in regional gaps as well, for places that might have a high population density (the mid-Atlantic) but don’t get a ton of love in the backpacking trail writeup world.
All that’s to say that for the next month, we’ll be periodically reposting this and trying to reach our funding goals to get more profiles onto the site and keep the site running. We don’t make any money from this … it all goes to the writers.
