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!