Show HN: Free, open-source site for finding beautiful hikes | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Free, open-source site for finding beautiful hikes

hike.io

145 pointszakn83 comments

Just my personal thoughts as a hiker; not a hacker, HNer or what ever.

Firstly: Dont be disheartened by my criticism which will follow. Its a decent first attempt, the idea is absolutely worth working on, and could become a valuable resource for a lot of people. On to the criticism....

What goes in the search? Are hikes named? Do I need to know the name to search for? Search for a location? From the first page, what do I expect from the site?

I click discover. Nice pictures. Click one. A description. I expected a map and what not. Not a big blob of text. Why not trail mini map?

As after a few click I didn't see anything useful, I gave up.

I don't initially see what the site is doing or offering. First think I think of looking for hikes is a map of the hike, where it is and the route itself. That tells me a hell of a lot in one go. Where it is, the terrain, length, and so on. Having seen that, then I want information.

I would add a defined difficulty level. Family hike? Casual hike? Hike for the experienced? What kit level? Do I need more than boots? And so on.

UI. Now, I don't like the flat design thing. Thats me. But, I was relieved to see you didn't got the the awful for ever scrolling down thing. So, this "asshole" (I was called that here for not liking those sites) is happy about that!!! But, on a serious note, in my experience, hikers tend to be older, and it might be that a more traditional site would be better suited. I dont know, but it might be worth trying to understand who is likely to use your site and find out what sort of UI they like to use. Or maybe offer a couple of skins ot layouts, one for trendy people and one for us old crusties.

Personally, I think the whole thing need a fundamental re-think, from landing page onwards. It is great idea. Hiking is an area which could do with a damn good info source. IMHO, there are a lot of problems. But, like I said, keep working on it. Its worth it, and I can see you do seem to have the skills to make it work.

Personally, I look forward to V2. Best of luck. It is a good idea, had huge potential, and I'd like to see it progress.

I appreciate the feedback, especially as a fellow hiker.

A number of people now have mentioned that the first page is not working, so that's something I'm going to reevaluate. I need more info there beyond a daunting search box. At the moment, you can type in the name of a hike and it will show up, e.g. try "The Narrows". The site assumes hikes are named. If you're searching for a location, then you need to go to the maps. I should probably support searching for a location via the search box, e.g. if you search for colorado it will show you all the hikes in colorado, or zoom you into colorado on the map.

Maps. Currently the way to get to the maps is from the lat / lng link in the info box on the side. This will take you to a full screen map with a dot for that location. From here, I'd like to add support for GPX routes, but that is not implemented. It's interesting that you're keen on having maps as the focus because I find that maps aren't that useful for me when researching a hike, I just want the highlights - distance, elevation gain, elevation max, and then I want to see pictures of what the hike has to offer.

Thanks for the encouragement, I'm taking a lot from these comments and will have plenty to work on.

Yeah don't give up on this, I've wanted a site like yours for years now.

But like the first poster said, there are some usability issues to fix.

Not sure if this was mentioned but for me the landing page works but I immediately click on Map because I don't know what to search for. Do place names show hikes in a specific radius? If so, what's the radius?

So map was much more straight forward to me, but when I then click on a red dot on the map I can't return to where I was on the map and the only way is to click Map again and return to the north american continent view.

I'm not sure I understand the question: "Do place names show hikes in a specific radius?" Are you talking about the orange dots on the map? They correspond to a single hike.

That is annoying that the map doesn't remember where you were. Seems like the best way to handle that is to store your last location in localstore.

He means if I type 'Seattle, WA' then what is the 'search radius' around Seattle that I will get for hikes?

Ah got it. At the moment, it would tell you that there are no hikes named "Seattle", since search only works on the name of the hike.

When I add support for searching by location (because this seems to be a popular request), then I think it should zoom you into the location, enough so that you could see all of Seattle. I think this can be done with google's jsapi / google maps but I'm going to have to investigate.

If the purpose of the site is to find new hikes, presumably we don't already know the name of the hike we want :)

What I expected was a location-based thing: show me hikes near where I live. I would find that tremendously useful.

Good start!

Perhaps take a look at AirBnB and the way they categorise some of their 'highlight' hosts. Perhaps you could suggest similar categories, "Scottish Hikes", "Mountains", "Ice Hikes", "River Hikes", "Best of Asia", etc. I appreciate you need some more hikes adding to the pool before you can do this (I'll add one later tonight).

Another idea regarding the usefulness of the landing page. Whilst I like to browse the hikes from other countries as some of them look very spectacular, it's not particularly useful to me. Perhaps with a bit of work you could do a 'get location by IP Address' or something similar and thereby suggest hikes local to me, or at least in the same country/continent.

My idea for the future Discover page was that you'd be able to filter the results by location, distance, elevation etc. I'm already using Google's jsapi to zoom the map into your location, but I've seen mixed results with it.

AirBnB is a great example of categories done right. I'll look into that.

I was also going to suggest mini-maps.

I would suggest you look at camptocamp.org, it's run by a french non profit (CC data, also has an english interface) and has a lot of users posting their hikes. It's pretty useful if you want fresh data about the terrain conditions of your future hike. They have a split by activities (just hiking, rock climbing, ice climbing, etc.) and also by hiking grade, height diff up, etc.

On a personal note I have a small webapp I used to share my location while hiking alone: http://gr5.herokuapp.com/ it has mini-maps based on the gps data I uploaded at the end of each day.

I like Walk Highlands - but it's only for Scotland: http://www.walkhighlands.co.uk/ and Geograph: http://www.geograph.org.uk/

Adding a captcha for the editing mode would be a good call, at the moment anyone can add anything, looking forward to the future of this site!

There are already tons of sites devoted to hikes. Here's why I made hike.io:

- It's all about hikes. Detailed trail information, beautiful photos, full screen maps, and not much else.

- It's editable. Anyone can add new hikes or modify existing ones, without having to sign in. (It's contenteditable and goes through a review process, try it out!)

- It's free. No paywalls or ads. Ever.

- It's open. The site's data is available under Creative Commons. The code is open source (I used AngularJS and Sinatra: http://git.io/hike.io)

There are still things I want to do. For example, GPX support, trip reports, and obviously I need more hikes on the site, but I thought I'd get it out there anyway in order to get some feedback. Any thoughts?

I like it a lot. No hikes in my area(Minneapolis), and I'm not enough of a hiking buff to know anything(though I would like to be). However, beautiful design and good functionality to it.

You say no paywalls or ads- what if this takes off? Just curious what you'd resort to.

That's a problem I'd love to have. I think the best way to keep a site like this going is through donations, but honestly have no idea whether that is feasible or not.

I really don't have problem with ads. As much as I love building things, there is a definite opportunity cost that comes with spending time in front of the computer that could be spent, you know, actually hiking with my family.

The overall design looks very nice so Google adsense type ads would take away from that.

Have you thought about getting individual trails "sponsored" by a local outfitter? In the info box on the left side you could have Sponsored by Joes Outfitters with a link to their site, and it would match the rest of the text so it wouldn't even be that noticeable.

Here's my concern with ads. Even if I managed a 2% CTR with a subtle ad, I'd still have 98% of my users carefully avoiding a part of the page that could be devoted to something else.

Someone mentioned affiliate links in a bibliography section. I could see that working because it's not intrusive, but you'd have to be careful not letting your sources be dictated by what's available on Amazon. I like donations because it keeps the financial goals of the site inline with creating the best experience.

I could see sponsorship links working, maybe on the homepage, or maybe in a separate /sponsors page. I'm not completely sure, it's a tricky problem.

The site is beautiful, and I really appreciate the open sourcing of the code. I teach high school kids how to develop websites with Angular and Ruby on Rails, and will point them to your git repo.

Quick question - how do you prevent spam?

Thanks! All changes go through a review process before they are pushed live. I get an email for each change and then can either accept or reject it.

I'm using Mailgun to do the mail stuff: https://github.com/zaknelson/hike.io/blob/master/server/util...

Hm. So how come you accepted this one? It's just a location, seems pretty useless: http://hike.io/hikes/vandelli

This one was just added by someone on HN. It's a bit like Wikipedia's stub articles. It's not that useful at the moment, but there's something here that should be expanded on in the future. Maybe I'll update it myself when I get some downtime.

Great site design. A couple ideas off the top of my head:

- Let hikes to include GPS route(s) to display on the map.

- Link to the USGS topo map that covers a given hike: http://store.usgs.gov/b2c_usgs/usgs/maplocator/(xcm=r3standa...

- Add a bibliography to each hike.

- Scrape some websites to create "stubs" for new hikes and encourage users to develop these.

- Speaking of stubs, if you are going to have collaboratively edited content why not just build on MediaWiki or similar?

- Use OpenStreetMaps instead of GMaps and encourage users to add trails to OSM.

Great feedback.

-GPX support is top of my list of TODOs.

-I like the USGS topo / OSM idea. I'll have to do some investigation to see how it compares with Google Maps.

- I agree that a bibliography is a must. This is also something I would have gotten for free with MediaWiki. The reason I didn't build on top of that was, basically because I wanted to have complete control over the end result. Writing the code was the fun part for me. That being said, I wouldn't completely write it off.

- And I did write one scraper already for wta.org, but was unsure about whether that was ok to do or not...

Cool. Not a lawyer but I think that if you are not copying the main content (just the metadata) AND putting the source in your bibliography you should be okay.

Also one simple way to try to raise money for the site is to use affiliate links to Amazon for any [e]books in the bibliography.

Put some info on that front page photo so people know what it is. If there's info there, it didn't show in my browser. (The hike for anyone unfamiliar is The Narrows in Zion National Park, Utah.)

Maybe also suggestions or random features on the front page? That could lead in to the discover page.

Run through "top hikes" sites for ideas on what to add yourself and build up your content. I was a bit surprised not to find more; you could build a starting list and then knock off adding 10-20 each night for a week and get your numbers up.

I've also found some arbitrary rankings or suggestions can be a good way to find the most special experiences. If photos are the only method of discovery, everyone ends up in Monument Valley and miss Arches when it should be the other way around.

This site (http://besthike.com/) is ugly but isn't a terrible way to get ideas of new hikes to research. I've found a few through that site which I've really enjoyed (TMB, Huashan, TLG, etc).

If I would have known I'd hit the front page of HN, I would have added more content :) But I agree, there is plenty of good information already out there. For photos, I can probably find Creative Commons versions on flickr. I've already asked about a few and people are surprisingly generous.

And good point about The Narrows. I should have that info on there.

"If I would have known I'd hit the front page of HN, I would have added more content"

You did submit it, so not much of an excuse! ;)

No downside to adding loads more content, whether for a Show HN or for the general well-being of the site regardless of HN. Go for it. Would be great to have more photo-oriented hiking sites out there.

Thanks, was coming here to ask about the front page picture. Wow, what a shame, I've been to Zion but didn't hike this place :(

Hiking top down is the ideal, but as any description also says, you can head to the busy bottom end and hike up as far as you want. We did it with a discarded stick for support and barefoot. Barefoot hurts, so take wetsuit booties or get your sneakers wet. Doing it without a hiking pole or walking stick is much more difficult and slow. You can generally avoid getting more than knee deep depending on the season, but there can be some surprises - my wife hadn't checked ahead and ended up chest deep at one point. That was funny.

It's an interesting experience and worth doing.

I'm excited to see where this goes. You are right about the competition. There is tons of information out there, but not many are wiki and none have the responsiveness or a clean modern design yours does.

Kudos on the "free and open" promise! I hate logins.

Critique: - I second the suggestion to encourage contributing to OSM. Most popular hikes will be in OSM already and adding them to hike.io could be as easy as selecting the route on the OSM layer. - can you use a USGS layer for US locations? see mapper.acme.com - Adding an entry should be easier. I selected the coords, but was still required to enter the state, country. I would like to simply add a few points on a map and have the elevation/gain calculated for me - driving directions? why a block of text? why not a link to google driving directions?

Awesome feedback. Especially the part about making the "adding an entry" part easier, it didn't dawn on me that some of that information is redundant.

The reason I've been writing driving directions in a wall of text is because in a lot of cases, google doesn't map all of the forest roads required to get to the trailhead. There are some hikes, like http://hike.io/hikes/mount-rose, which do and in that case I include the link in the Directions header. I thought it might be nice to also include the step by step directions in case you don't have an internet connection, but you're right, it feels extraneous.

And, I'm going to have to investigate OSM, you're the second suggest that.

Make sure to look around a bit for different OSM tile renderings, the .org default is a little dry for outdoor stuff. This one is nicer:

https://www.mapbox.com/blog/mapbox-streets-terrain/

This site maybe doesn't have the greatest UI, but it works for exploring some of the data that is available:

http://hiking.waymarkedtrails.org/en/?zoom=9&lat=40.44379&lo...

(If you click the "Routes" button in the lower right it pops up a box listing the routes near the current view)

This site looks great for inspiration, but for me the most important thing when planning a hike is being able to see updates on current conditions (e.g. is the trailhead accessible? Is there snow on the trail?).

One of the best-implemented hiking sites in my opinion is hikr.org, though the information I need tends to be on local sites like wta.org or nwhikers.net.

In addition to submitting trip reports to wta.org, I keep a record of my hikes at https://zenobase.com/#/buckets/u07qih0a27/. It's a more general-purpose service, but I can filter by any combination of region, hiking distance, duration, season etc.

Trip reports are something I've been thinking about adding for a while. The problem I face at the moment is that they're only useful is you have a very active community. I'm still trying to figure out where hike.io fits into the hiking website ecosystem. Maybe it makes sense to keep it limited to just "wikipedia for hikes" and leaving trip reports to the location specific hikes. I think I'll add support and see what kind of traction I get.

Thanks for the hikr.org link, I haven't come across that one before. And very cool trip tracker of your hikes.

The only way to get this done correctly is to have a mobile app. You can take advantage of the mobile GPS and the fact that hikers would love to update their phones with their trip info.

The only downside would be connectivity issues while on the trail.

Besides the points already mentioned by other commenters I'd say imperial units all over instead of metrical system being used was a big let down to me for using the site. Given only the US uses imperial stuff it would be reasonable to assume metrical units for any IP not located in the US, unless the site is targeted for american audience.

Also, I'm not sure how multi-trails hikes should be organized. I tried to add the Annapurna Circuit in Nepal which I did a few months ago (and is actually a series of hikes between villages) but I could not figure it out and gave up.

Good work though, don't give up now! I know a lot of people who have been looking for a site like that :-)

If it's any consolation, I'm using the metric system on the backend and plan to add the ability to change your default units. I don't want hike.io to be US-centric.

Multi-trail circuits are not really supported at the moment, but I like the idea. You could hack your way around it currently by creating a "master hike", call it Annapurna Circuit, and then link to the other sub-trails from the master.

I've created issues for both of the things you've mentioned - https://github.com/zaknelson/hike.io/issues

Awesome!

I think you need some kind of reputation/review system in place. I used to do 8-9 hrs hikes and in that case you need to know the new guy won't start screaming in pain after 4 hrs.

Also, most of the hikers are in a group, there should be a way to create a group tied to a specific area.

Finally, you should think of something better than donations to keep this going, because potentially it can go very far. The thing is you are hosting pictures, can't you use an external provider (flikr, picasa)? Otherwise, if you reach an important size (and for this site, you have to), even a supporter budge (a la couchsurfing) for $5 a year could bring you nice revenues.

I was hoping that distance + elevation could give a sense of the difficulty without having to create a "difficulty scale". The problem I always have with such scales is that each site is different and their definition of a hard hike is not my definition.

In terms of monetization, all I know at this point is that I want it to be freely available without ads. Beyond that, I'm flexible. A supporter badge could work. I was also thinking it would be cool if there was a way to monetize the pictures. For example, if you could order prints, a portion of the revenue would go to original photographer and hike.io.

Looks nice, works fast.

I'm going to be biased because I like hiking, so what a surprise I like a hiking site.

I already upload pix of hikes to panoramio, perhaps you could share those pix. Panoramio's licensing system is totally bizarre, I think they're trying to get permission for simple CC:SA from uploaders but they dumb it down into prose so I'm not entirely sure what they're asking. Licensing equivalent of security thru obscurity. If you're trying to CC:SA or CC:NC then just call it CC:SA or CC:NC instead of making the verbal equivalent of an interpretive dance.

Aside from pure and simple CRUD it would be interesting to see more complicated stuff. Find me the hikes within 10 miles of my sister's house and shorter than 3 miles and a low vertical component so when we visit in the summer we can take a short hike with the little kids. Or some kind of popularity stats or voting for most beautiful scenery, or least mosquitoes. Given a pile of data there should be more to do with it than "find me a name" and "its nearby". A query that sounds like "Find me the hike within 50 miles of my house with the fewest pix and/or shortest writeup"

(edited to add, something I've never seen before, but would be hilarious, would be rating hikes not by the usual stars or distance but little icons of mosquitoes, or bug spray icons or something, wetlands (swamps) are beautiful in the winter or around a hard freeze, but in the summer, ugh)

Something I've never seen before that just jumped into my head is integration of weather.gov weather reports / forecasts with hike data. Am I wise or an idiot to want to visit Glacier National Park in April? Shorter term, I have this Friday off, will it be good traveling weather to go 25 miles away or should I stick to snow shoeing in the local park (because of a blizzard, or perhaps it'll be -20F again and even the locals stay close to home when its below -10F)

WRT polite monetization, if your site took off and I participated, if my wife bought me a logo-d tee shirt for my birthday, I might wear it when hiking, in the summer anyway. Or amazon affiliate links might not be too intrusive.

Regarding my suggestions above, take them positively as intended.

Might want to work on the search.

I typed in "Goat Rocks", since, well, Goat Rocks. No results.

Then I clicked "Discover", which prominently featured Glacier Lake, which has the intro text: Glacier Lake is a hike within Goat Rocks Wilderness in western Washington state.

... Shouldn't that have come up in my search then?

I can see how that would be terribly confusing. Currently, search only works for the name of the hike.

I've added an issue - https://github.com/zaknelson/hike.io/issues/24

Tried out several popular hikes in Washington and didn't find any. Almost every state has outdoor organization which maintains trail list. You should consider scrapping them and seeding your site (I believe most sites are open & nonprofit). For Washington, it's wts.org.

Typo? wta.org

Funny thing. I actually have a scraper for wta - https://github.com/zaknelson/hike.io/blob/master/scripts/scr...

I haven't seeded production with it yet because I was a bit unsure on whether that was ok to do. Maybe I should send them an email...

Minnesota has Scientific and natural areas ("SNAs"). They're listed online, but I don't know if they're easily scrapeable.

I think scraping stuff like this would be a good start to get an initially useful set of data started. I know I'd love a better map for SNAs.

http://www.dnr.state.mn.us/snas/index.html

Great site! I think there are a lot of fun things to add in the "hiker" space. I would have found it more intuitive to start with the map view actually, instead of a text search, since I think most users will consult your website AFTER knowing where they are located, rather than already having pinpointed specific trails.

I've been thinking of creating a hiking app for a while now, but just haven't been able to free up time. When I was living in Berkeley, I think I went hiking pretty much every single weekend, and I could think of a ton of things I'd have liked to have been able to access on my phone to make my experiences that much richer.

Anyway, good stuff and kudos for open-sourcing it all!

I appreciate it! For your app idea, if there's anything that fits into hike.io's domain and you want to discuss it, feel free to shoot me an email.

Hi, this is awesome!

Hopefully useful feedback: when I saw that, I immediately thought "what are some nice hikes around where I live?" and even though the tagline is "Find beautiful hikes", the homepage doesn't suggest that I can find the answer here. Maybe that's not the point of hike.io, maybe there's another website that would help me better, I don't know.

Anyway, the big picture of the Narrows, which is one of the very few hikes I've done, inspired me to look for new trails around where I live. Thanks for that!

And good luck, I can't wait to see how hike.io will grow!

That's awesome that you got inspired by my picture. That hike is inspiring, probably my favorite of all time.

Thanks for the feedback too. I want to support finding nearby hikes in two ways:

1. If you go to the maps page, it should zoom you into your location and show you hikes nearby. That part works, but I also wish it zoomed out when no hikes are within your current viewport.

2. Also (and this part isn't done), I wish there was a way to filter the Discover images by location.

Feel free to add any of your local trails or update the Narrows.

Defaulting to a search by name makes no sense to me. If I already know the hike name, I probably have resource to tell me about it.

Likewise on the 'Discover' feature. If I am looking to go on a hike, seeing nice picture from 4 states away doesn't help me.

The map search is where it is at, if you get enough content in there. Right now, the content is so limited that it is not even worth discussing.

It does show promise, but I'm also not sure why I would use your site vs. any of the other dozen sites that can tell me where my local hikes are.

Is there an opportunity to use this to build on a dataset like Open Street Maps? I don't know much about that space, but it seems to me that your users will either be consuming hiking trail maps, or generating them. If they are generating them it'd be awesome if there were a way to contribute the data to some copyleft source. Assuming that's something you're willing to do.

Admittedly, Google Maps is much prettier than I remember.

It's a very nice looking site. Here are some ideas for future things that I would find useful at least:

- Dated reviews and pictures. This is one of the biggest things I look for when searching out hikes and haven't found a reliable site for

- Hiking buddies? I think adding an "I want to hike this" button, and having some way for people to contact each other and plan hikes would be cool and I'd definitely take advantage of it.

Hiking buddies is a neat idea. You could choose to share an email address (anonymized, similar to how Craigslist does it) and have it expire after a reasonable amount of time.

Hello @zakn. Great site. I have one question. Can you please share from where are you getting the description of the hikes. For Example: http://hike.io/hikes/salkantay-trek

Are you manually typing out all the data or you hired someone to type all this out. I know you are using community to edit this , but who made contribution for the first time ?

That one was all me. I did the hike, took the pictures, and typed it up. And actually most of the hikes I wrote, although I'm starting to get edits from others. One great example is Mount Meru - http://hike.io/hikes/mount-meru which was done by a good samaritan I've never met.

oh thats cool. Well, we are also working on something similar, so i was just curious.

So cool! It's something similar to what we have built at Metwit:

http://weatherguru.metwit.com/ based on Foursquare API + Metwit weather API.

Any feedback? http://hiking.metwit.com/

Thanks!

Google maps? In 2014? For outdoors-y stuff? really?

(the site is beautifully designed though)

I'm going to be looking into OSM because of comments here. I've also looked at MapBox but last time I tried the mobile web experience was basically unusable (although Google Maps isn't great either).

Do you have other suggestions?

Can you elaborate on this? Our goal is to be exactly the opposite of this -- to be eminently usable. So I'm curious what you're seeing specifically.

(Sorry, rereading what I wrote makes it sound pretty slanderous). Not sure if you'll be doubling back on this, but I thought I'd respond anyway. I was talking about the mobile web experience, specifically on Android.

I was playing with the MapBox SDK roughly a year ago and I remember having a lot of trouble at the time panning and zooming. This was on a Droid X. So gave up on it at the time, even though I thought the desktop experience was so great.

Anyway, I just tested again, and whatever I was seeing before is not there. I'll give MapBox another shot.

Search is useless if I want to discover new trails I don't even know the names. Show me a huge list grouped by city, state (or country) and tons, and I mean fucking tons of pics.

Plus maps and info on how to get there.

zakn, since you said you're still trying to figure out where hike.io stands in the internet of hiking, you should know there is an app called "Yonder" that focuses on high quality photos of the outdoors, submitted by members of the Yonder community (who are by design mostly hiking types). They have an iPhone app and have a UI modeled after Instagram. I've used it to find hikes around my area. You should check it out for the some of the social-oriented features it has.

I like the use of graphics on the site.

To make the home-page a bit nicer you could include a list of examples to try out in the search bar. Right now it is hard to decide what to type into the box.

WHY would you have to search hikes by name instead of location?

Here was my reasoning. There are 3 main use cases:

1. I know exactly which hike I'm looking for. I type it in, and there it is (I know that currently that is almost never true, but let's assume there is a good number of hikes on there already).

2. I want to find hikes near me - rather than type it in, I go to the Maps tab. It should automatically zoom me into my location, to display hikes near me.

3. I want to explore new hikes, not necessarily close to me. That's where the Discover tab is useful.

Watching the logs and reading the comments here, I'm finding that it's very natural to search for a location as well. I'm adding it to my TODO.

Awesome!

Dead simple, clean UI, and just great picks of landscape photos as well.

Good job man.

Wow. You made my day, thanks so much.

As pretty the site is, i'd love for some info on the landing page. Maybe have a few blocks of text when u scroll down? A few FAQs maybe, like how can i find a hike? Who can contribute? etc etc. The single "Name of a Hike" search bar is a bit daunting. It expects me to know something (which i obviously don't). Maybe consider making the "Discover" Page part of the Front page? Or maybe make it THE front page?

But, still a pretty cool site

That's some feedback I've heard a couple times now. I was going for simple, but just having the search box only addresses the case where the user already knows what hike they want to find (and actually is pretty useless at the moment, since there are only a handful of hikes on the site).

Putting some more info on the homepage is a good idea, whether that ends up being the Discover page... I'm going to mull on it for a bit. Thanks for taking the time to comment.

What qualifies as a hike? How far? I don't want to list what others won't see as 'true' hikes.

That's a good question.

At this point, I'd say just add it, since I'd rather have more data. If it becomes a popular resource, I suppose the site will need a clearer definition of what constitutes a hike.

Feature suggestion: let me enter where I live, and offer me 2-3 great hikes that are X miles away.

yes. I thousand times yes. I'm always seeking for sites like this (anyone any recommendations?). You should enrich it more with advice, equipment requirements etc etc... (and of course with more hikes :P)

the "Four mile trail" is 9.6 miles :) http://hike.io/hikes/four-mile-trail

Maybe it's a loop hike? I'm not sure, I will have to ask my girlfriend, she added that one :)

looks great and a great idea. don't forget tag support to allow users to group hikes by region (i.e. hikes around "yosemite") as the content increases.

Wondering from where you are sourcing your photos.

A lot of the pictures up there are ones I've taken. There are others that I've pulled from flickr (after first getting permission from the photographer), for example, the landscape on http://hike.io/hikes/mount-meru, is from a flickr user.

I love it. I will definitely add some trails!

Elegant design, great job!

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