Why I Built This Site

For my forthcoming trip I really wanted to balance the desire to share with that of being untethered.

Not too long ago I thought to myself "I should hike the Pacific Crest Trail". All 2662 miles (4284 km) of it. In not too long I will try. Along the way I'm bound for some epic adventures. I'd love for a way to take my family and friends along for the journey, digitally that is. There's only one problem. I don't like social media.

I could probably write an essay arguing why but as the great Kevin Malone once said "why say lot word when few do trick". Social media sucks. It sucks for the addictive features, it sucks for the self-confidence busters, it sucks for the data lock ins, it sucks for the privacy invasions, it sucks for the platform restrictions, it sucks for the hate fueled conversations, and it sucks for the information bubbles. But everyone already knows these reasons and figure them an alright price to pay for dank meme wars. I get it. There are as many if not more upsides than downsides. But there's a reason social media sucks that maybe isn't mentioned as frequently as the others. Social media lacks context.

Everything shared on social media is a " moment". A single photo, story, video, tweet, or even link are all shared in isolation from one another. Yet that's not how things actually rarely are. Even a picture of an amazing vacation is greater in context to the previous weeks boring desk job. Yet these contextual bits of information are seriously lacking from any popular platform. Ephemeral moments competing for our fleeting attention. And all we're left with are particles of thoughts, experiences, and ideas.

There are certainly good reasons to use these platforms, and I probably will, but for my mental health and intellectual curiosity they rarely suffice. In regular life I do just fine as a passive lurker but for my forthcoming trip I really wanted to find a way to balance the desire to share with that of being untethered. A simple blog or public photo album would be an alright start but still too restrictive. I want to take my family and friends on the journey with me. Have them seen the things I'm seeing, understand the challenges ahead and behind, and get to peek into the day to day of their PCT thru-hiker. They should be able to ask how many miles did I walk today? What was the weather? Where did I start and finish? Who did I meet? What portion of the trail did I tackle? What night camping was it? What views did I wake up to? How was all this different from yesterday, or two weeks ago? Where will I be tomorrow or two weeks from now? All of these questions are real elements of an experience full of continual context not easily broken down into one off data, tweets, images, or stories.

My mission with this website is to create a place to share the journey in its continuum. Start to finish, in real time, with all the possible context of the experience itself. So I put together this site, a collection of realtime content from my journey, shared automatically in the background to my regular activities. 'Waypoints' are fetched from my Garmin tracker, 'Photos' from a Google Photos album, 'Words' my notes app, and 'Logs' the result of a Shortcut on my iPhone. It took a few trys to get right, and I fully anticipate Uncle Murphy to laugh at all efforts to prevent an implosion on day 1, but for now I'm glad about the results and excited to experiment with this form of journaling from the trail!

Todo: Organize a more in depth explanation of the technical implementations.