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A Horse Named Mandy posted:Interesting update: the tribe's reservation website is back, except A: it's a different web address. B: they never told anybody about it, but C: everything was still booked up in a day and D: they continue to get slammed, so have shut down the reservation portion of the website. Maybe next year, but after making easily over a thousand calls over the course of a week and never hearing anything other than a dial tone, it's an discouraging note to end on. I wonder about that too, I don't really know for sure. There was a huge jump in popularity of the JMT right around 2012 I think. Some people blame it on books like Wild and the JMT documentary that went on around that time, etc, but I don't know how much of it is a temporary surge and how much of it is going to stay that way. That it was such a huge jump all at once would seem to indicate a non sustainable surge but I don't really know...you'd expect the number of people backpacking to increase in general as the population increases but it certainly shouldn't jump that fast. I think there is an increase in endurance sport type activity that is spilling over into backpacking and traditional trails like the JMT and PCT. There's a lot of competition to do it the fastest or stuff like that which is driving at least some traffic. The internet and ease of sharing information also makes a huge difference and probably is a fundamental shift right there...used to be you had maybe some maps, word of mouth, and a few books if you could find them to plan a trip and maybe a friend who showed you some awesome pictures. Now you've got GPS tracks that show exactly how to get to anywhere complete with professional photographs of everything. Makes it super easy to plan stuff and there's a bunch of people always looking for the next awesome must see place to go. Ultimately I dunno, I had the best vacation of my life hiking the JMT in 2014 but I almost feel like I'd have a hard time recommending it to someone now as it's pretty drat crowded. I hiked a few miles of it last summer as part of a different cross country trip and there seemed to be more people than a few years ago. Deviate just a bit from it though and you'll find hardly anyone.
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Feb 9, 2017 23:29
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Haha I mean yes those people are part of it but I don't think i'd lump in the people who legitimately do the PCT with the yoga pose people. I do think its become a "so cool you gotta do this" kind of thing plus there's some commercialization of the big trails now (people getting sponsored by gear companies, etc)
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Feb 10, 2017 05:29
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eh the CDT is a weird "trail" at this point and not a popular one in the US yet. I don't think the entire thing is even quite connected as one big trail yet.I'm sure when the PCT gets played out people will move on to the CDT though Maybe it's just more people with more leisure time at this point in history.
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Feb 10, 2017 19:25
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pointsofdata posted:i think it's cool that so many people are enjoying the outdoors. sure the social media types are annoying but that's the case with everything. I would say that this outdoors trend doesn't seemed to have reached british young people yet, when i'm walking it seems to be mostly older brits and younger eastern europeans. I think my only complaint is that it seems mainly to be targeting specific popular places and trails and are overburdening them to some extent, but that's what happens to popular places I guess.
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Feb 11, 2017 18:55
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