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

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.

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...

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.

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.