Welcome to Trail Notes — the Pack Hiker blog. This is where I'll post news about features, fixes and plans for the site. For a first post, it seems only right to start with why Pack Hiker exists at all.
One Place to Plan a Group Hike
Many a hike that I've helped organise has involved passing messages between people using different messaging platforms and being unable to share the proposed routes easily with the group due to some people not having a navigation app or subscription. This has lead to situations where some members have been anxious and felt excluded, half the time a google spreadsheet ended up being the master tracker for a hike and it was never very elegant.
These challenges inspired me to create Pack Hiker. It puts the whole trip in one place — routes and maps, the day-by-day itinerary, food planning, shared gear, expenses, chat and safety details — so everyone on the trip sees the same, current plan instead of the version that was true two weeks ago.
Privacy is a Priority
A tool like this ends up holding genuinely personal information: emergency contacts, travel plans, sleeping itineraries. I take that seriously, and Pack Hiker is built so that even I, running the site, can't casually see it.
The admin tools show me account basics — names and email addresses, the hike name, its dates, how many people are on it. It doesn't show me the inside of your hikes. No itineraries, no chat, no gear or food lists, no expenses — and no emergency contact details. Post-hike check-in alerts are handled entirely by the system; the admin dashboard tells me whether an alert had somewhere to go and whether the email was delivered, never who your contacts are. Short of digging through the raw database by hand — which I don't do — your plans stay between you and your group.
The Privacy Policy spells all of this out formally.
Where Pack Hiker runs
Right now Pack Hiker is self-hosted, on hardware I run myself. I aim for 99.95% uptime — no more than about 20 minutes of downtime in a month — I have monitoring in place and automatic retries on email delivery, so a brief outage doesn't swallow anyone's safety alert.
If the site becomes popular, the plan is to migrate to a professional hosting service with a 99.99% uptime target and managed email delivery — improved reliability as more people come to depend on it. The privacy approach above won't change with the move.
What's next
Trail Notes is where updates will land as new features ship. If you're new here, the Help Centre walks through every feature, from the section planner to post-hike check-in alerts. And if something is confusing, broken or missing, I'd genuinely like to hear about it at adam@packhiker.com — Pack Hiker will improve faster when the people using it tell me where the rough edges are.
Happy hiking.
-Adam