David Wilkinson and his wife Samantha have a snazzy new international adventure travel site. They already have some great content featuring New Zealand, Norway, and Nepal. But there’s much more to come.
Switchback Travel is an informational site—not a booking site—and provides comprehensive coverage of the world’s most extraordinary outdoor destinations. Given the desire to avoid the narrow and beaten path of existing travel information, the site is comprised not of sterile, exhaustive lists but instead offers an abundant collection of essays, photographs, maps, user input, and other helpful tools. …
… You know what you can do? Stop sharing things you don’t want tracked. …
Before and after March 1st best advice is not to do anything online you’ll regret in future. Somebody, somewhere could be tracking it. And it probably won’t be Google. They’re one of the least evil players.
If you want to dig into this deeper, the best authority is Jeff Jarvis. He’s the author of:
Kolby Kirk is some kind of Da Vinci of the trail. Check this sample page from his 2011 PCT journal.
I saw JEFF THROPE link to that on Adventure Journal:
… After being laid off from his job in April 2011, Kolby Kirk (The Hike Guy) decided he would attempt to complete as much as he could of the 2,650-mile Pacific Crest Trail.
Starting at the Mexican border near Campo, California, he walked for 159 days and nearly 1,700 miles. In that time, Kolby wrote 850 pages in his journals, a few of which he has started to scan …
J.K.: Wild night by a waterfall
Gambolin’ Man vs. hungry bear
Clarke Green: Rough night in the ‘Daks
Tgabrukiewicz: Taking a beating in the Trinity Alps
Zachary Robbins: Chillin’ in Linville Gorge
wikiexplora has the best TOP 10 and TOP 50 treks list I’ve seen online, aside from our own. 🙂
1 Chile Torres del Paine Trek, Patagonia Spanish | English
2 Perú Inca Trail
3 Tanzania Mt. Kilimanjaro
4 France-Italy-Switzerland Haute Route
5 Nepal Everest Base Camp
6 New Zealand Routeburn track, Fiordland-Mount Aspiring Nationals Parks, South Island
7 Pakistan Snow Lake/Biafo-Hispar/Lupke La Region
8 Pakistan Baltoro glacier / Concordia
8 India Zanskar river, Ladakh
10 USA Kaibab trail, Grand Canyon (Rim-to-Rim), Arizona
map of Paine
(Disclaimer… Inca Trail doesn’t deserve to be in the top 50, the most overrated walk in the world.)
That list was arrived at via recommendation of these 9 guidebooks:
Book 1: A Journey along the World’s Great Treks by Jeff Salvage and Kirk Markus
Book 2: Classic Hikes of the World: 23 Breathtaking Treks by Peter Potterfield
Book 3: Top Treks of the World by Steve Razzetti
Book 4: The World’s Great Adventure Treks by Jack Jackson
Book 5: Outside Adventure Travel: Trekking by Outside Magazine
Book 6: Ultimate Adventures a Rough guide to Adventure Travel by The Rough Guides
Book 7: A Year of Adventures by Andrew Bain
Book 8: Lonely Plante’s 1000 Ultimate Experiences by Lonely Planet
Book 9: Classic Treks, The Most Spectacular Hikes in the World by Bill Birkett
wikiexplora.com is mostly in Spanish, but the treks list is in English.
I’ve added a permanent link in the right hand navigation. It’s a fantastic resource for hikers.
… Corsica is a mountainous island in the Mediterranean and its GR20 is reputed to be the toughest waymarked trail in Europe. It is an ambitious route for fit and agile walkers, covering 190km in about two weeks as it makes a complete traverse through the high mountains, backpacking the whole way, sometimes with hands-on scrambling. …
Starting tomorrow I’ll post my day-by-day trip report with annotated photos. It turned out to be the toughest hike of my life.
Lonely Planet:
1. GR20, France
2. Inca Trail, Peru
3. Pays Dogon, Mali
4. Everest Base Camp, Nepal
5. Indian Himalayas, India
6. Overland Track, Australia
7. Routeburn Track, New Zealand
8. The Narrows, USA
9. The Haute Route, France-Switzerland
10. Baltoro Glacier & K2, Pakistan
California Through My Lens is dedicated to the “great state of California and the wonderful beauty it has to offer to the photographer and traveler“.
It’s well done. I’ve just subscribed.
Check out some hiking trip reports. For example, Heart Rock Waterfall in Crestline, CA:
… the true draw of this hike is the fact that the waterfall has an almost perfect cut out of a heart right alongside of it. The heart itself looks small in the photos, but could easily hold two adults in each of its halves. This is a little gem nestled in the San Bernardo mountains that I recently stumbled upon on world of waterfalls but had never heard of even after I had lived in this area of CA for my whole life. …
Let’s say you’re a hiker in Lausanne, Switzerland. In July. Those mountains look very appealing from Lake Geneva.
Would you go … HIKING? … Or pop in to the nearest Travel Agent to buy an expensive flight home to Canada? (Double the cost of the same plane flying the other direction.)
It’s a long, sad story 😦 … but due to a series of failed computer repairs in inefficient Italy, I cut short my European ramblings and will be hiking the Pacific N.W. in August, instead.
besthike.com 