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Comment by carabiner | Hacker News Reader

This trail only opened last year, and was inspired by the US Pacific Crest Trail. The creator (from Chamonix) quit his tech job and journeyed from South America to Canada, and while on the PCT wondered why doesn't France have its own grand mountain trail? So he and a few others planned this route, crowdfunded an app to consolidate its info (campsites, water sources) and came up with this. https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/Mag/Nature/New-3-000...

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Nice story. But all the guy did is take parts of 47 trails that have been around for decades and put them in a single map. The trail didn't "open last year". The website did, maybe.

Yep - like the article says, he didn't hire backhoes and trail crew to build new trail. The route as a new linkup of GR's opened last year due to the creation of the app. Planning the route of 3,000 km with water sources, road crossings, camp sites, towns, points of interest is a massive amount of work though. Think of building a Google Maps-level rich display of a path across the US starting from just paper maps and Wikipedia, knowing that users could potentially be in danger in the wilderness if the information is wrong. This is a huge effort and I have no doubt that this will become a very popular route because of his work. This was a heavy lift in GIS!

All of that was already in the GR footpaths. I mean, come on, do you really believe it took a startuper to launch hiking in France?!

Yep I’ve done a good chunk of Stage 2 it seems, because much of it is part of the Tour du Mont Blanc. I can’t rave enough about the experience, though. It’s a beautiful trek well worth doing. Especially that segment.

The GR didn’t open last year… they’ve been around longer than the author :)

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