A Decade of Geolocation Apps

Our Journey from Guthook to FarOut

It’s fall again, which means Florida hiking season is truly upon us. And it was fall when this whole journey started. A decade ago, we were in Shippensburg, Pennsylvania to talk trail to hikers at the Appalachian Long Distance Hikers Association Gathering. Florida Trail, of course.
 
We had a table in the hall between the classrooms where the workshops were being held, and people stopped by to ask questions and leaf through our books. At a nearby table was Ryan “Guthook” Linn, who was talking up his new app for the Appalachian Trail.
 
He took a look through the first edition of The Florida Trail Guide on our table, and made a comment to the effect “this would work well in app form.”

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FarOut Guides for Fall

Thanksgiving week, FarOut Guides knocks a third off the price of their hiking and biking apps. We supply the data for three of them. Take a look!

All links are affiliate links. We earn a little something for our effort each time you buy an app from us.

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I’d been the app route before, so I was a little wary. I’d worked with a San Francisco-based app publisher to build three apps on Florida’s outdoors in the mid-2000s. They were groundbreaking at the time.

My Florida State Parks app was in existence before the state ever thought of creating their own. It became one of Apple’s “recommends” from their editors soon after launch. But alas, the company I was with toppled over their own internal struggles between staff, and myself and dozens of other content creators were out in the cold.

Ryan had a fresh take and a new company with partner Paul Bodnar. They’d launched the very first app for the Pacific Crest Trail app called “Guthook’s Guide to the PCT” just a year before.

Key to their approach on apps was geolocation. “Location Services” are now something you pay more attention to on your phone, but back then, it almost felt like a hidden feature.

Thanks to your cell phone carrier, your phone always knows where you are, even when it’s in airplane mode. For hikers wanting to use that built-in GPS to pinpoint exactly where you are along a trail, it was a perfect match for the app framework Ryan and Paul pioneered. So John and I signed on.

We’d only just debuted our new guidebook, The Florida Trail Guide, so we saw the potential for broadening and deepening the quality of the data in the book based on what we’d need to collect to put in the app. It’s remained a symbiotic relationship to this day.

If you’ve never used a geolocated app, you’d be surprised at how helpful they can be. Maps and waypoint photos can be downloaded in advance of your hiking or biking trips, so you can find exactly what’s near you in detail when you’re out there on the trail.

There are two interfaces for navigating: a map and a guidebook. The guidebook shows what’s going on waypoint by waypoint, and can be filtered to narrow that information down to show just what you care about on this particular trip, such as water sources.

Use the guidebook mode for planning purposes, and map mode, with GPS on, when you’re out on the trail. Trail users can leave real-time comments on waypoints, invaluable for long distance hikers concerned about water levels (both for drinking and wading) and for trail maintainers to check on any issues with downed trees or broken boardwalks or bridges in their sections.

After a year’s worth of truly detail-oriented work, Guthook Guides debuted the original iOS Florida Trail Guide app a year after we met Ryan, in the fall of 2015. The Android version came out a year later.

Ryan stepped back from hands-on work to consulting, and Paul’s wife Alice Presley Bodnar became our go-to person for updates. A name change slid the branding from Guthook Guides to Atlas Guides and finally, FarOut Guides.

Last year, FarOut added a desktop version of the app for tablet and home users, making the apps accessible to anyone no matter what kind of smartphone or tablet they use.

We wrangle the app content; the team at FarOut, still the same after a decade, handles all the programming magic behind the scenes.

Since our Florida Trail guide became part of the broad family of digital trail guides now available through FarOut, we’ve contributed two additional guides.

One is for hikers and cyclists on the Florida Keys Overseas Heritage Trail and one for Eastern Continental Trail hikers seeking to connect from Key Largo to the Florida Trail.

Now we’re working on more.

For almost fifteen years — since those original apps of mine — our website readers have requested an app version of FloridaHikes.com. With over 2,500 pages of information on this website, it’s a bit much to try to stuff in one app.

For the past couple of years, Chris Stevens has been assisting us by keeping data fresh in the Florida Trail guide. We are now collaborating on what will be the first of a series of Florida Hikes guides for FarOut. When it’s ready, we’ll be sure to let you know!

Meanwhile, for Thanksgiving Week, FarOut is holding their annual 30% off sale on all their apps, ours included. Take a test drive of the Okeechobee East section of the Florida Trail to see how the apps work, and grab one at a discount through November 27.

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