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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.