Social Networking Sites & Hiking
In the beginning…
Hiking normally starts off as a solitary experience. When you take your first mini hike and realize that it’s something that you enjoy, you end up taking on more challenging hikes. Chances are, you’re also the only one out of your group of friends who enjoy the outdoors enough to devote an entire day to it. Funny how that happens.
So after two months of exploring the trails on your own, and hyping it up to your friends as the ultimate experience do they decide to tag along. Little do they realize though that after two months you’ve progressed from couch potato to an almost hardy outdoorsman. Hiking in 100 degree weather doesn’t bother you too much anymore. But for your friends, pure torture. Somewhere between miles 3 and 4 it suddenly hits that they’re not quite at the same level. They either end up out of water, having knee and joint pains, or are just hating life all together. By the time you hit the shower that evening, word has already spread and you get pegged as the crazy outdoorsman from that point forward. So to alleviate this problem, what do you do? Find fellow-crazies.
Using the vast power of the internet, I began my search for some hiking friends. Here are my results in the approximate order that I happened upon them:
1. Facebook – I started my own hiking group called the “Pasadena and Beyond Hikers“. This served my purposes well enough, although no one actually showed up. But it is from here that I found the “Los Angeles Hiking” group on Facebook as well. This had a lot of users, but like the Pasadena group, hardly anyone went on a hike.
2. Outdoors Club – My research continued. I found another site and ended up signing up with them Outdoors Club, but I was turned off by the site design. Plus, I wanted to do my own hikes and they required some fees.
3. Meetup – After a couple of months in the Los Angeles Hiking group on Facebook, I came across the Meetup.com Los Angeles Hiking group. Ze was the organizer for both, and he eventually brought me in as an organizer for both the Facebook and the Meetup group.
What a great resource this has been. Hikes for all levels can be found here. Plus, people actually do show up. Although, the first many trips I posted only got maybe 2 or 3 people since I was new and didn’t know anyone yet. After time though, the core group started forming and now we’ve got some regulars.
That’s about it. Even though there are organizations out there such as the Sierra Club that I could have joined, I didn’t for my own reasons. And in regards to Outdoors Club, Zé has had some success getting people to come along on a hike with him. But you would have to ask him about that.
Another great tool for finding like minded people would be the San Gabriel Mountains Discussion Forum. This is a great tool for reading gear reviews, finding a hike, etc.
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 17th, 2009 at 12:02 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
