The class of 2026 has effectively drained my motivation to spend thousands of hours maintaining this website, paying for it to be hosted ad-free, researching and writing content, or participate with the online PCT hiking community at all.
The only way I can stop them from stealing content and posting as their own in search of likes, followers, and attention, is to remove it.
For five years the online hiking community has been using this content collaboratively by LINKING to it and by contributing to its continuous improvement. This hiking season things started off in an uncooperative way and just got worse from there.
Background
My experiencing planning another PCT hike in 2019 was that it was very difficult to quickly find the information online; some needed information was missing, a lot of information was old and no longer relevant to the current season, the same questions and answers were repeated over and over in different groups and pages with varying degrees of being correct or not. And whether section hiking or thru hiking, getting information about just the state and section I was currently focused on was near impossible. Anyone seeking information about just Oregon or Washington had to wade thru an enormous amount of discussion about the California dessert or the Sierra, where I was not.
When the previous owners of the PCT Washington and PCT Washington Trail Angels Facebook groups encouraged me to revive them in the early spring of 2020, I did so with a set of clear goals intended to spare other hikers the same difficulty:
1). Separate content about the trail itself from content about individual hikers needing assistance, hence two Facebook groups. This helps members get what they need faster.
2). Proactively answer the questions we see over and over every year so the group can focus on more interesting and meaningful discussions. Do this using high-quality answers built together over time as a group. Help users easily discover this information on their own.
3). Create a way for people who have specific questions in mind to find the answers to those questions. This would be a sister website that is continuously updated using information brought in by the group. Feedback from the group on the website would continuously improve the accuracy and completeness of its content.
4). Be an information hub, not more content “mud in the water”; Identify authoritative sources of information and lead users to them. Do not reproduce redundant content. If you say rain is coming, then link to the forecast - don't pretend to be a weather service. If you say there's water there, then link to the FarOut comment. If you say there's a fire there, link to forest service alert or the IRWIN report - don't pretend to be a fire authority. And so on.
5). Seeking likes & followers, gate keeping, and attention-needy egos caused the problems we sought to solve. Creating yet more redundant content was the problem and we would not do that in these groups. The groups would not be about individual personalities; they would be a hiking community coordinated by a group of admins who were as anonymous as possible and acted behind the scenes.
6). Respect the members. Do not spoon-feed information to the group. That is called gate-keeping and it’s a disservice. Instead, teach the group where to find authoritative information and how to get that information for themselves.
Realization
What the class of 2026 has helped me realize is that the above vision is not a shared one. People seem to love recreating the wheel and slogging thru a pile of bad or partial answers to questions asked over and over every year. The goal is not one community sharing facts and complete information. The goal seems to be who can get the most likes and followers by gate-keeping information and spoon feeding it to viewers. That would be totally fine if it was something I could separate myself from. But by the fourth time I saw my content directly cut/pasted into a Facebook post without a link or source reference, I realized that the vision was not working and not worth the enormous effort I’d been investing. The content was being used counter to the vision under which it was created. Based on the reactions (or the lack of), people seem to much prefer that chaos of following celebrities over collaborating on a crowdsourced hub of information with an idealistic data nerd.
There is a small chance I may restart this on May 1st, 2027 if I don't see people on Facebook actively working against the vision of a collaborative hiking community.