TrailsNH turns 15 years old today. I registered the domain name on November 17th 2008. It took me another 6 months before the first version of website was ready to go live. I created TrailsNH out of my passion for hiking and coding, and to share my skills with other hikers. I wanted to create a platform where hikers could find the most recent and relevant information available for planning their next hike in New Hampshire and beyond.
Before 2008, I had written many web bots that eventually became the back bone of the site. These bots crawled various hiking forums and websites from the basement of my house. The bots would gather and collect the data and create a map overlay that showed the location, date, and summary of each trip report. This revolutionary approach allowed hikers to easily find trip reports near their next destination, from multiple hiking sources
Since then, TrailsNH has grown and evolved to become one of the most popular and trusted websites for hikers in the region. TrailsNH now offers more features and services, such as summit forecasts, forest road closures, beautiful interactive trail maps, trail alerts, community gear surveys, and more. I appreciate the recognition TrailsNH receives from hikers and hiking groups for its valuable contribution to the community.
I have been working on TrailsNH for more than 15 years. I have dedicated countless hours and resources to maintain and improve the website. I have learned a lot over these years: MySQL, PHP, CSS, Bootstrap, Mapbox, and countless API’s. I still follow my original vision and mission for the site: “Everything a hiker needs to plan a safe hike”. But, I’m not done. There is still more work to do to provide the best service and experience I can for hikers who use TrailsNH.
If you find the TrailsNH.com useful and want to support my work, please consider making a donation. Your donation will help me cover the costs of running the website, such as hosting, domain, and software. It will also allow me to continue to develop new features and functions. It will also show me your appreciation and encouragement the site I work so hard on.
Thank you for being a part of the TrailsNH community!
Up a mountain, Down a beer!
– Kimball
image credit: dalle3
