You've planned the trip. Someone asks how you did it — a mate who wants to walk the same track, a walking club forum, the person who talked you into it in the first place. Until now the only options were "I'll invite you to the hike" or "here's a 12-page PDF".
Neither is quite right. Inviting someone into the hike hands them the group chat, the expenses and everyone's phone numbers. The PDF is a lovely thing to print and a clumsy thing to paste into a forum thread.
So there's now a third option: a public link to a stripped-down, read-only copy of your hike plan.
What it looks like
The route map, the elevation profile with the steepness colouring, and then the days — each one showing where it starts and ends, how far, how much climbing, where the water is, and what you wrote about it. Anyone can open it. Nobody needs an account.
A shared hike plan is a privacy problem...
Everything in Pack Hiker is built on the assumption that a hike is private to the people walking it — emergency contacts, phone numbers, who owes who, where everyone is sleeping on Tuesday. Publishing any of that to the open web would be a betrayal of the whole point of the app. So the shared copy isn't your hike with a few things removed. It's a much smaller thing, built from scratch, that only contains what you are comfortable for a stranger to safely read.
It carries no dates at all. Days show as "Day 1 of 12". A shared plan should never be a notice that your house is empty from the 3rd to the 15th.
It says nothing about people. No members, no pack shadows, no avatars, no phone numbers or emails. Not even how many of you there are.
Whole features are simply not included. No expenses. No food plans. No gear lists. No chat. Nothing at all from Emergency — no contacts, no PLB information, no check-in settings. Food drops show where they are (and you can choose not to share these), never what's in them. Flights and accommodation entries are dropped entirely, because a flight number and a hotel booking say exactly where a named person will be on a named night.
Even the map is careful: waypoints you've hidden in the app stay hidden, and the page can only ever draw the frozen copy, never your live hike.
And then there's what you wrote
That covers the structured data. The harder problem is free text — your descriptions, your notes, the little reminders you left yourself. "Gate code is 4471." "Key's under the pot at 14 Ellis St." "Ring Josh when you get to the top."
No amount of clever filtering makes that safe automatically. So the flow is built the other way round: nothing is public until you've read and approved it.
When you share a hike you get a draft first. No address works yet. You see the whole page exactly as a reader will, and beneath it every single piece of text that would go out — in the order it appears on the page — each with a switch to remove it. Pack Hiker also highlights entries worth a second look: something shaped like a home address, a booking reference, a phone number, an email, or a name belonging to someone in your pack.
Those are hints, not decisions. Nothing is ever removed for you. When you're happy, you press the button that makes the shared link live.
Snapshots, expiry and revoking
The shared page is a snapshot, frozen at the moment you publish. Editing your hike afterwards doesn't change what readers see until you choose to update it — The share screen tells you when something has changed.
Every link expires after a definable time period and you can stop sharing at any time, or regenerate the address if a link has traveled further than you meant it to.
True of everything on the web: revoking a link stops new views, it cannot un-read a page someone has already opened. The link is unlisted and we ask search engines to leave it alone, but it is public to anyone holding the address.
Where to find it
Open a hike you own, and there's a Share button on the Overview. Only the owner can publish, revoke or regenerate the link.
There's a write-up in Sharing your hike publicly