First, a Bit of Housekeeping

So, that took far too long, but here is only my second post since announcing the purpose of this website back in September 2021.

My intention at that time was to write more frequently. I had shared how writing benefits me and how, by opening up on the web, I hoped to invite people to get to know me and my thoughts. This, I believed, would build confidence in my role as Creative Director for The Hikers, a position I aspire to take on long-term if the project takes off.

However, the year that followed proved a difficult one. 2022 was marked by sickness and the passing of several loved ones: my uncle, grandmother, and one of my best friends who often ventured into nature with me, one of my original hiking buddies. Additionally, the ongoing war that Russia launched against Ukraine deeply affected my wife, who had family on both sides.

Fast forward to the present

After relocating to a different part of the city and renovating this new place in 2023, I feel more confident that hiking, and the lifestyle that comes with it, will become a much larger part of how I spend my time beyond my work at Netsite, where we run a subscription based business model, selling internet infrastructure.

And this brings me back to The Hikers, an idea about a web application, that came to me on the hundreds of hour-long walks I took with my sleeping son in the stroller. Now, with introducing the concept publicly, I remain careful to strike a balance between discussing it and holding back until my future team and I have something substantial to showcase.

It’s one thing to envision a thriving platform with a growing user base, but without effective recruitment and development execution, talk is cheap.

However, the only way to make people fall in love with the idea, the concept, and its potential, is for the project to exist out in the open, having its seeds planted. It is therefore on me to present and conceptualize it to everyone, simply to invite people in, intended (and unintended) users.

To understand how professionals could benefit from The Hikers, I went on a trip to Utah with Andrew Skurka’s guide company, back in April last year. The insights gained, has me further strategizing on how to best approach turning the dream of The Hikers into concrete goals and actions, but with this article being the starting shot.

Writing to sharpen the message.

I’m not worried about someone “stealing the idea.” Elements of it already exist in platforms like LighterPack, Pak Mule (new), AllTrails, Couchsurfing, and Relive, but they remain pieces of a larger puzzle, that I see are yet to be solved, and this is where The Hikers comes in. These existing projects reinforce my belief that there’s a space for the product I’m designing, though time will tell.

I also recognize that the idea, concept, design, and functionality of the web application will greatly benefit from the input of a development team made up of like-minded hikers, alongside a community of potential users, rather than just myself. In fact, I love discussing it with others because these conversations always expand the concept and deepen my enthusiasm.

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Becoming a Hiking Advocate

“THE MODERN hiking trail is an uncanny thing. We hikers generally assume it is an ancient, earthborn creation—as old as dirt. But in truth, hiking was invented by nature-starved urbanites in the last three hundred years, and trails have sprouted new shapes to fulfill their hunger. To properly understand the nature of a hiking trail, one must trace the origins of that yearning, back through those early hikers to their ancestors, who set off the chain of innovations and calamities that would gradually distance humans from the planet that birthed them.”

Robert Moor in On Trails – An Exploration

As I set out to build a web application that aims to embed itself to your journey, how you first ended up hiking is one of three key stories to me. What from your hiking trips make you do it again and again, is the second. And if you’ll never do it again, the third: what ended your interest?

In 2013, when my friend Tobias first took the initiative to hike in nature and invited me along, I jumped at it out of a mix of favoring saying yes to things, liking to travel, and enjoying spending time with my friends. I had no gear, no experience, and not really the profile for it, but another friend lent me her backpack, setting me up to go.

Only a few hundred meters into the trail, we came across some domesticated guinea pigs next to a stump, looking shocked by their surroundings. It was a strange sight, but we speculated a rare cold-hearted Swede had abandoned them there. Fresh from the city ourselves, their bewilderment at nature seemed to perfectly mirror ours, evoking a slight sense of foreboding. But, having just started our hike, we too showed our cold hearts and decided to press on, leaving the critters to their fate, just as the trail ahead would be ours.

Regret soon followed as we realized we could have simply carried them in our hands, the mascots of our very first adventure.

For us, the hike ended as planned, reaching our exit at the national park’s visitor center. By being accessible by car, as well as the bus that would take us back to civilization, normalcy reached us well before we were flat on the center’s grass porch, with weekend crowds making their foray up the beech covered ridges from which we descended.

As we sat down to understand the end of our first hike, we faced another more profound exit: the shelving of our newly created outdoor characters. As everything had been different to the city, so had we. Coming back on a Saturday night, made Copenhagen feel like Gotham City: dark, drunk and senseless. What do to with such an experience?

The Hikers as a software project is a direct answer to that question.

Sweden’s Söderåsen is surely a beginner’s national park, but any first trip in this “hobby” serves as a pivotal moment of one’s entry. My sense is, even if the hike didn’t go as planned, that we’re either spurred on for more, or we have that one dramatic story to tell, about why we are never doing that again. Me? I went out and bought a backpack. On this trip I discovered something in the choiced hardships of hiking, that would later come to define my adult personality.

The form of travel that hiking had proved to be, quickly lead this friends-based hiking group to an expert trail in Trollheimen, Norway, followed by a trip in Snowdonia, Wales, and then another in Abisko, Sweden. We also revisited our first hike in Söderåsen, this time witnessing our progress from beginners to experienced, as we aced it. The period marked our best stretch of continuous and impactful hikes, where we enjoyed the preparation and planning almost as much as the trips themselves. Today, with our group scattered, I’ve found myself doing the last few trips alone, though not by choice.

I much prefer to hike with friends or even just about anyone now, like other hikers you meet on the trail, who are a breeze on your solitude. Yet, there’s a lot of value (and lessons) in hiking alone. One of those is learning to be in your own company, undistracted. However, the hiking trips with my friends were unlike any other activities we shared. They were like us playing a co-op video game, but with something tangible on the line. They were, for lack of a better word, proper adventures. By some stretch, it was ourselves inserted into an Indiana Jones movie, Lara Croft-ing our way from A to Z. The uncertainty, unpredictability, and unfamiliarity in being out there, all added to a sense of danger that the servitude of city life had shielded us from.

Hiking, especially to remote places with no internet, forces your attention to be only on your immediate surroundings. This anchors you to the moment you’re in and fully focuses you on the now, your friends, and the journey you are undertaking. And with everyone in the same spot, like that, I find that we flourish in a particular way, both individually and together. If you spend enough time out there in the wilderness with your friends, you’ll have those laughs that nothing else in life gives: The raw sensation of our planet slowly creeping up on you.

Upon returning home from Abisko, I published an article on Medium.com, concluding:

“Later in life, as responsibility and complexity grows, time with your friends comes increasingly in small boxes. A half evening there, a concert shared, birthdays dawned, the catch of a late night movie. When do you ever get to spend 9 consecutive days with your best friends, and have everybody focused on where they actually are, as they too share the downfall of online? One helluva good answer to that question is: When hiking with them to remote places. In abundance, if life permits.”

The Antidote for Us City Zombies

For us, who grew up together with boredom in abundance, and when we were with our friends, we were really with our friends, hiking to these remote places took us back to being children, and the trail, despite its occasional seriousness, were a playground.

To myself, and to the older generations that I find are now stuck on phones, to the new generations growing up with screens everywhere, always connected to the internet in the company of others, including my son, I argue, that hiking is a way out of the maze, and one that most people can just take up. One day you’re sitting, endlessly doomscrolling the internet, the next, you’re on a path, eyeing the world anew.

New research in neuroscience says exposure to nature is a necessity for a healthy brain. Hiking is both a powerful and easy remedy to heed that advice.

In between our hiking trips, we would return to our life in the city, a life I cherish and refer to as the Dream phase in the context of hiking and The Hikers. But back in the city and back on the internet, an itch for the next trip would linger as the differences and the value of the last time out became clear.

With pocket-sized cameras making YouTube ever more popular, videos began to spring up that took you hiking while being stationary. Those videos made you dream of places to go and of that next trip, when and wherever it would be.

“I enjoy arm-chair backpacking by obsessively planning for the few trips I can go on.”

“I love planning trips to keep me involved from afar.”

Users from /r/Ultralight/

The name of John Zahorian, a hiker from the US, comes to mind. Many of us who have watched his films on YouTube feel as though we know him, despite never having met him in person. I mention John specifically because he is one of those characters you can encounter in the world of hiking—not just through YouTube, but by simply going out and hiking yourself.

I also mention John because his personality and authenticity in front of the camera (as much as that can be conveyed) shine through in his filmmaking. But above all, his storytelling of thru-hiking adventures across the US is masterful. Whether he likes it or not, he became, at the time, a towering figure in hiking advocacy and the relationships it fosters

And if you, like John, can inspire people to go out and form their own connections with nature, I find, there is much to admire. Judging from the comments on his videos, the recognition and longing for experiences similar to his, runs deep.

To me, the longing and yearning for these trips, boils down to the inherent separation of today: a nullified connection to nature equals losing sense everywhere else our lives. Just as the universe is constantly expanding, so is mankind’s triumph over the environment that gave us life. Many of us grow up without any personal connection to nature, mistaking watching nature related TV shows, as a boy scout badge earned.

We don’t feel the basic greatness of our planet, nor do we spend any time contemplating it. We are simply distracted from birth, with nobody putting us on the beating chest of Mother Nature. Something is surely wrong in how we set up, but once you’re out there in it, moving across her land, you’ll get a sense of the missing ingredients.

Experiencing, say, seven days in the wilderness with no internet access and few to no people doesn’t make you want to tear down society when you return, but it certainly gives you perspective on what is important to you and your life. Out there, you gain a better understanding of who we used to be—at least until humans transcend into something entirely different.

Hiking is taking a break; it’s meditation without needing to train your mind. It just happens. But we don’t yet exist in a vacuum; we share this planet, a living, breathing entity that is increasingly under distress. What does it do to us to largely ignore that fact?

With recent breakthroughs in A.I., we seem to be heading towards a future where everything is solved, possibly rendering the human experience as we know it, obsolete. Why bother with hiking, if a pill tricks your brain into the same sensations? This prospective future adds even more weight to my experiences in the backcountry.

Are we among the last people to enjoy nature like this? Is it possible to scoop up humanity from its roots, just for the sake of efficiency and optimization? We want Earth’s wildlife to roam, as they do, without human interference. But what about letting ourselves roam as we do? If we will no longer be humans, of flesh and blood, why should we, of flesh and blood, care about leaving the planet and become interplanetary?

Hiking, as it stands, is our basic gateway to exposure to nature, right now. Meanwhile, the growing number of internet-connected city dwellers worldwide are being told to dive into a metaverse and be content with a digital world devised by a corporation, a life of even more screen time.

We’re being conditioned for a WALL-E-like existence, floating around inside, living off fluids, forgetting what matters in all the distractions. Integrating people disenfranchised from this future, into the environment where hiking happens, and in a respectful way, is an underlying mission of The Hikers.

Even with what I perceive to be my own limited amount of exposure to nature, it has gotten difficult to witness why nature itself and the cosmos (natural science overall, I guess) is not the prevailing direction of today’s humans.

At the wheelhouse of our fate, two drunk captains steer recklessly ahead: loopholed capitalism and religious ideology. One refuses to change, even as it drives the physical destruction of our only home. The other pollutes our minds, urging us to believe in a reality beyond the one unfolding before us on Earth.

Not to mention our love fallacy for a Strongman [authoritarian figure].

Of course, capitalism and religion brought to me a life, that for most humans of the past, is the life of a king, but are any of them, in their tried and tested stage, solving our problems of keeping Earth habitable, humans happy? Are there only happiness for most humans in a world where we are removed from physical experiences?

Of course, it doesn’t really matter. We live short lives, we were not always here and we will not always be here. But we flock to the sensations of hiking, in part, to get away from the inauthenticity creep of today.

In preparation for my hike in Utah, I was watching Ken Burns’ The American Buffalo, flabbergasted, despite not being completely ignorant to story it tells. I could not help myself remarking on how the bison were recognized through spirituality as an equal to man, and how I understood it from what I consider a logical point of view of today.

Of course, all this existed only until utterly crushed by the rush of monotheistic and wealth-seeking Europeans. But instead of awing at churches and mosques, tribes took their gratitude to mountains, rivers, and forests, making sacred not the man and his words, but the reality in front of them. On the continent of America, there were already a tangible god: The bison. A planetary creature just like us.

The stark difference to life that came crashing in on the shores of the continent, I find, leads to the thinking that spirituality or faith based on the things you can see, smell, and touch (verify), like that astonishing animal walking among us, should logically have no real substitute. However, here we are.

Hiking, of course, doesn’t turn you into a Native American, but in the spectacle of nature, the church is the terrain, the priest is a tree, and the prophets are animals. There, it is fantastically silent from us, silent from our past as well as from the direction we took off in, and seem unable to change. Out there, we are more equally on terms with what birthed us, and once that breaks for you, it’s hugely attractive.

Hiking, I find, is the back to basic activity, stripping us of embedded layers, allowing us to feel born again, without any indoctrination. Nothing and everything is out there. And most importantly, as a modern person: Personally feeling the grandeur of our planet, invokes a kindness in you.

“A man misses something by not establishing a participative and living relationship with the non-human world of animals and plants, landscapes and stars and seasons. By failing to be, vicariously, the not-self, he fails to be completely himself.”

Aldous Huxley

The path I want to take for myself and with The Hikers is not about creating YouTube films, obviously, or preaching what kind of life you should live or what you should believe in.

The Hikers is about putting together beginners, experienced, and professional hikers, getting everyone on more hikes in their one wild and precious life, elevating their connections with (new) friends and family, improving their mental health, all the while being their own witness to the spectacle of nature. Rekindling or maintaining the connection to nature and, if needed, taking people back to worshiping the planet as opposed to the gurus.

In a way, it’s about having real experiences versus imagined (digital) experiences (only), balancing them far better than today. You dream about doing that hike, visiting that country, seeing that remote part of Earth, but dreaming is always easier than doing. The transition to doing is something The Hikers will assist you with.

I think with how much we live on the internet and how much some of us live off scripture, hiking without either of them is a form of reality check. How are you, really? Go hiking and find out. In the book In the Kingdom of Ice, Hampton Sides quotes the seaman William Nindmann saying, “Nature is my God. I don’t believe in the hereafter. This world is where we get all our punishment.”

I love this quote for obvious atheistic reasons, but especially because of its pertinence: As far as we know, we have only this one life, and making the most of it should be our focus. If you, like me, recognize, or eventually come to recognize, the essential ballast that hiking and its sister activities provide, making them a continuous part of your life becomes crucial. Doing so while you still have the physicality, equally so. Living distracted by the internet, surrendering your attention to casino-style addictive social media, and watching endless TV shows, less so.

Every hike usually comes with a certain degree of punishment dished out by Mother Nature. But precisely because it’s a physical activity, subject to nature’s whims and your own body, hiking makes you feel like the living being you are, something deep inside re-lit. Especially if you, like me, roam the city, high on service and consumerism. Carrying only what you need to survive is not just feeling alive, it’s being free.

To brainstorm the project’s ambition and distill the fragments, I’ve begun with the basics: Who I am, what I like about hiking, and how I came to recognize its importance as an antidote to the gravitational pull of modern life. Since evolving in the hobby myself from a beginner to an experienced hiker, I think I’ve found a label for the character in me that arose on that first hike a long time ago.

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Offline Hiking, Distances & Remote Places-Enthusiast

It’s not that I’m extreme in the hobby, but I have simply learned how good it is for me to go on substantial hikes (exposure to nature), and to do it with some frequency.

There are many reasons, why I think hiking is the essential activity of our time, but here is what I personally like (in no particular order):

• Planning and Preparing – The Dream Phase: Mulling over gear and maps, trying your best to make an educated guess on what is needed to survive and come through a particular hike in the conditions forecast. Equipping yourself for the “mission” in this vastly different environment from the city feels like becoming an action figure. Putting on your backpack is a license to adventure, an alter-ego of who you would have been if life’s setup was a bit different.

• Pitching a Tent/Shelter: Being able to set up a home anywhere. When you discover a great spot, you can call it camp. Carrying everything you need with you and living minimally for a moment, just you and your pack, with all your burdens being mental.

• Camaraderie in Group Hikes: Nurturing and rekindling bonds, being challenged as a collective, and personally evolving and adapting as the hike progresses. Any future reference to that hike will be a great point for you and your friends. You banded together to complete something difficult, something with uncertainty, a quest to spend time in nature, which in return made it meaningful.

• Joy and Accomplishment: The madness, joy, and sense of accomplishment you feel when you reach the latter days of or complete a longer trip. It’s a kind of physical meditation that transcends to your mind, an unparalleled feeling.

• Indifference to Annoyances: Gradually becoming indifferent to annoyances like (a moderate level of) bugs, bad weather, or having to cover distances elsewhere in life. Complaining less as a byproduct of hiking. You become tough, but in a good way.

• Contrast upon Returning Home – The Impact Phase: The contrast to the city, as if it now has literal gates. How just one week of hiking feels like one month away. Time slows down on the trail, giving you the mind of a child again.

• Memorable Experiences: Remembering every hike I’ve ever done speaks to the quality of time and impact it has on you (and your friends). The small details, jokes, specific challenges, and the point of no return. The feeling of your true self coming out when your mind is isolated to your surroundings and cannot escape to comfort via the internet. Instead of seeing people you know through a screen, your brain has to work to imagine them, or they are simply right there with you on the trail.

• Spectacle of Nature: Being constantly in awe of the unusual and beautiful places you encounter. Seeing the planet and not our bulldozing of it. Discovering parts of my own country I would never have visited otherwise and meeting people from those areas.

• Escape from the City: Going to a place with no human institutions, just your mind. Little or no people. No internet. Silence from the man-made stuff. Exchanging buildings constantly blocking your views with vast horizons or mountains.

• Lifelong Learning Experience: Hiking offers many variations and ways to approach it. Some, like Andrew Lin from Adventure Archives, show how knowing your plants and trees can elevate hiking. I love its pathways to other activities, such as climbing, canoeing, and bushcraft.

• Form of Traveling: Taking yourself from this point to that point, completing the goal of the distance, with camp spots along the way. Being dropped into nature, the exposure starts, but it’s the movement across its landscape that elevates the experience. By walking the terrain, your personality aligns with it.

• Relationship Building: When I think of any of my friends or family members, I dream of going on a substantial hike with them. There is just no better relationship builder than a proper adventure. If I could somehow go on a hike with my late grandfather Jørgen, in his prime, it would be priceless. These feelings lend themselves to the notion that now is the time to do it. Keep hiking until the grave. And if you’ve got the keys (experience/gear), try to do it with a friend, even if they have no experience or apparent interest.

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Once You Are Out There, Magic

From the very bottom, I’ve found hiking to be the ultimate way to switch off to switch on, pausing from motoring on life’s highway, thus realizing where you are in life. But also that it’s quite easy to flick the switch; you just need a little bit of establishment.

Somebody or something to send you along the way, like The Hikers, which will be an internet platform sitting among the many, yes, but standing out with success not being its level of advertisement sold and constant engagement of its users.

The Hikers will compete for your attention when you are on the internet, yes, but success will be measured by data showing how many hikes are initiated and completed among its users, the platform being a wholesome part of creating physical experiences in their lives.

It aims to put a break to the notion that we need to spend more time online and in the metaverse, as opposed to opening our doors and venturing out into nature with our friends, a final boss to beat being a mountain peak instead of a Bowser [Super Mario final boss].

“The defining quality of the metaverse will be a feeling of presence / Feeling truly present with another person is the ultimate dream of social technology.”

Mark Zuckerberg

Unlike Mark, I personally feel like we are reaching some kind of peak of artificial connections, and the pendulum is swinging back towards experiences that are physical and exist outside the internet because, in essence, they are more fulfilling to us as humans, introverted or not. And that those experiences don’t always need to be broadcasted.

Why do I need a social technology, to replace meeting my friends or missing them? I think it’s impossible for Mark not to see the world through the prism of what he has built (Facebook), and in this vision, a social network should not merely serve as an extension to one’s (offline) life, but it should dominate (Facebook needs engagement to generate revenue).

We obviously hurdled towards the digitization of everything because that’s what we do with new things, but life remains best when it’s balanced. Yes, I’ve immensely enjoyed playing computer games with my friends, but we could have played outside just as well. The Hikers will take elements from gaming that are great (not noticeable to non-gamers), and use them to engage the user to “play outside” along with whatever else they do in life.

If you are otherwise without disabilities preventing the most basic form of hiking, walking from one point to another is a fundamental ability of ours. Yet with bikes, buses, trains, cars, airplanes, and everything we need around the corner, it’s something of a forgotten superpower. We can actually move by ourselves. And as I believe everyone can do it, flick the switch, and go hiking, I want to dedicate myself to this advocacy.

I personally would have loved to have discovered hiking, and everything it encompasses, much earlier in life. I live with regrets in this regard and wish I had stumbled upon a platform such as I envision The Hikers to be, to draw me in from my computer-centric place.

With The Hikers, I want to catch anyone lingering on the ridge of trying their first adventure and facilitate their integration into the wonders of this hobby, this way of life, or match them with professionals like Andrew Skurka, who can accelerate it, or who can be the component in realizing dreams of reaching difficult and far-flung places of our planet.

I want to give people for whom hiking is an established hobby a place to authentically cultivate their interest and a platform from which they can initiate hikes and finish them, essentially writing their story and accomplishments in fun but useful ways. And lastly, I want to give professionals access to users on the platform, for either information on their upcoming trips or just inspiration.

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A Break from the Perpetual Online

“I’ll have you know: The world was better before cell phones. You probably cannot even imagine how you would live life without a cell phone. It used to be that you’d go outside, and nobody knew where the fuck you were. It’s called freedom. We’ve given up our freedom.”

Tom Green in Philadelphia

To be perpetually online, which is what most of us are nowadays with phones carrying an internet connection, is to accept a constant flow of unlimited information, connections, and interactions at any given moment. In the long run, I find that this “life” actually decreases my creativity and probably my well-being. Here, I talk about original creativity, what comes from the depths of my mind, what is truly formed from my own thoughts and experiences.

To be offline is to remain unlimited but in limited surroundings. By being limited to your surroundings, your imagination expands and explores on its own, undistracted. This kind of resetting is hiking’s “secret” superpower, beyond gifting you unbelievable views of Earth and its weather systems, and adventures you remember for a lifetime. By putting yourself at the center of the spectacle, your personal views of nature are formed and enriched, likely leading to increased empathy and respect for our planet’s basic greatness.

Once you are out hiking, it becomes a way to discover or rediscover yourself and reflect on what has happened to you since some point in the past. When I’m on the trail with my friends, and because they are all present, it is evident we lost something in the perpetual online. It’s powerful to spend time with people in a place of origin, where they get to the bottom of themselves and where a person’s attention and creativity can flow undisturbed.

Depending on the trail, hiking is also about facing adversity, confronting your own abilities and fears, enduring the elements, and accepting a degree of uncertainty. That not everything on a path can be planned, but it turns out you’re strong enough to pull through.

To hike is therefore to endure and exhibit all the emotions we have as humans, and more importantly, to find that there is a vast space for those emotions to flow and fellow people who appreciate them. For every hike completed, there is often a return of a more grateful and stronger character, which benefits everyone.

In undertaking hiking, you also acutely realize that you are actually on a planet, in a solar system, trotting along on its rugged surface, with the universe glowing overhead. Internet-connected cities, however great and easy they are to live in, are not the be-all and end-all of human existence.

A small portion of offline time, served up by going hiking, is usually enough to start questioning how beneficial it is to live your life based on internet attention span first and “the rest” later.

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From Shackles of Comfort, to Trips on a Whim

“I’m just obsessed with backpacking and my only wish is to be able to do it more 😭

As a family man I only get to go on one hike a year at this point. I obsess over it each year and day dream about it constantly. Getting out into the wilderness heals my soul.”

An user from /r/Ultralight/

But, what involves flicking the switch? What is required? Is it really that easy to just go hiking? In this series of writing and analysis, I’m explore those questions, calling it the Phases of a Hike – The underlying purpose is two-fold:

1. To create a guide, that exists along side The Hikers, as a helpful resource on the net, but also to support the project’s mission, of putting people in nature, on hiking trips that are well-prepared and well-executed.
   
   As of now, I’m calling it The Everyone’s Guide to Hiking. A name that plays on my belief, that hiking is truly for everyone, but also that for people who are well into hiking, or even professionals, there’s a reference point, a place to point their clients to.
   
2. To explore what a web application, that is part of your hike from start to finish, and the in-between, could and should have in terms of design and functionality.

Hiking at its core is an especially character driven hobby or occupation, that subsequently deals with gear and places (maps). It takes a certain character to willfully choose a physical hard, sometimes uncomfortable and uncertain trip, over more luxury orientated travel, and sometimes at the expense of time with one’s family.

But, I argue that the benefits outweighs these challenges, and all it takes from you, and your character, is a bit of curiosity, some gear, a initiative and some will. And all of us poses those attributes, however well we’ve been kept from them by internal or external factors. There just needs to be an opener, and sometimes that opener is of your friends, like it was for me.

Sometimes it’s stress, and you are looking for a way out, and hey, there’s a path in nature. But the better you plan any adventure there, the less overall suffering you are likely to endure, which for anybody, professional or beginner, is always welcome. Usually you will start out all heavy in gear, settling on being too prepared, but further down the line, you stand to become an ultralight, minimalist, ready to pivot and adapt.

So, naturally, the web application starts with you, the character, and your personal progress, as you go from hike to hike. But also the progress of your hiking group, if you choose to create or join one. From there, the platform seeks to engage you (and your friends) in the 3 phases, that hiking consists of, creating a sort of a scrapbook/diary of your achievements, and what you are looking forward to, serving that itch for a next trip.

None of this is to gloat, or say, hey, look at me and what I did, or to create some better version of yourself online. The purpose of the platform it is to learn from a past trip, to spur you on to another, and simply to enjoy the memories. I’ve named the phases, or stages if you’d like, Dream, Adventure and Impact:

The thing is, unless you orchestrated your life to accommodate for this activity often, or made it your lifestyle, hiking is something you take time out to do. And with leisure time in scarcity (5-6 weeks a year in the Danish labor market), you kind of want to get your hiking trips right, and you best have some trips in the pipeline or time simply passes by.

In the everydayness of life, dreaming of the trail can be ripe, of those places you want to go to, of new gear that will improve upon prior situations. Time is there to imagine, plan and prepare for future hikes. This downtime between one’s hikes, I’ve labeled the Dream phase, and The Hikers will be a playground for that. This is from now, as you sit and read my text, to the minute when you are hitting the first point of the transport, that starts your Adventure, the second phase.

The Impact phase is the aftermath of a hike, and starts in the moment when you embark on your return, at the end of your adventure. For us city dwellers, there is the clash of modern life you so ruthlessly forgot while being out there, with your new found love for virtues of a more simple life. And by this analysis, the subtitle for The Hikers wrote itself:

The Hikers
Dream. Adventure. Impact.

“… I think we can say some deeply true statements about what humans seem to care about, and that figuring out how to create those things, figuring out how to build the experiences, products and services that people of the future are going to want — figure out how to be useful to people — that seems like a really valuable thing, more than any specific set of knowledge.”

Sam Altman in conversation with Chris Hyamse

The aim for The Hikers is to be an online-to-offline business, akin to Couchsurfing, before their botched attempt at introducing users to pay for the platform on a monthly basis. The aim is to have the ease of use of Airbnb, but all the tools needed for professional guides to do good business for themselves.

The ambition is to build the web application in the open, being honest about cost, development choices, and what factors dictate the price, thinking of users more as members, and giving all employees a path to company ownership.

The mission is to create an authentic internet platform that can stand the test of times, and be used by generations. Part of the transaction in asking people create content on your platform and supporting the platform financially, is letting them know of the ownership structure, and that it can’t just flip if somebody decides to exit. Setting strict foundations to avoid enshittification.

Focus will be very on much on this is who we are, this is what we build, this is how we measure our impact, and this is where we are going, and if you cannot see yourself in this, the project is probably not right for you (in terms of joining the development)

If you made it this far – Thanks for reading (my ramblings) 🙏

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• Follow the project on LinkedIn (for now) – I’m launching the project’s web site soon.
• If you are interested in joining the project or have any comments (or want to share your hiking story with me), please reach out to me at cn@thehikers.com.
• I highly recommend to watch Ken Burns’ The American Buffalo.

/Caspar