A Bit of a Manifesto

Early on when starting Afield Trails, even before it had a name, people frequently asked me what success would look like. My answer was simple: we succeed if someone uses our app and sees something they wouldn’t have otherwise noticed.
Ideally, it would be something truly serendipitous such as noticing that you’re in an animal’s home range and then catching a glimpse of it. It could, however, be as simple as coming home saying you saw “granite boulders and lodgepole pines” instead of “rocks and trees.”
Many writers over the years have commented on that gap of expressiveness, some as surprising as Jane Austen, who wrote, “Lakes, mountains, and rivers shall not be jumbled together in our imaginations” (Pride & Prejudice). In his recent book Landmarks, Robert Macfarlane argues poignantly that building our vocabulary for describing these places helps us realize their value. So, while we may not be as articulate as John Muir or Enos Mills, if we can help our users see these places as they might have seen them — full of detail, contradictions, and stories — we can help preserve them.
But, why create an app? There is certainly no lack of good hiking webpages and guidebooks in the world. There are even a few apps out there for hiking in the national parks. Why create Afield Trails?
Simply put, Afield was created with a different purpose in mind. Its purpose is to give you insights and answer questions while you’re actually visiting a park, rather than sitting on the couch. For all the advances in technology, guidebooks remain amazingly static. Why should a trail description follow the specific route the author walked and wrote about? What if I turn left? What if the trail has changed?

We also want to bundle together hiking tools to help visitors stay oriented and better anticipate conditions. For instance, the maps are always available offline, with no extra “download the maps” step. Cell signals in many national parks are spotty or nonexistent, so we need this navigation feature to operate whether you have a signal or not. For me, this is personal. Before we made the app, I once ended up lost off-trail descending from Chasm Lake in Rocky Mountain National Park. I did not know it, but I was heading off in a direction where there were no trails. Luckily, I found just a sliver of a phone signal, enough to pull up a coarse Google Map, and determined which way to turn. We want to keep you safe and oriented in just this kind of situation, without the worry of finding a data connection.
I think many people’s visits to wild areas like national parks leave them with an impression of a timelessly preserved place. In reality, it is anything but timeless. The seasons always bring change to the plants and animals. Grazing, fires, beetle infestations, and the natural progression of species constantly alter forests. The flora and fauna are trying to adapt to the changing climate around them. There are many stories that can be made tangible by visiting a national park.
In creating the Afield Trails app, we are trying to bring these stories to life at the most memorable moment: when you experience them. It is easy to read about a ponderosa pine tree at home, for example, but so much more memorable when you learn about it, then reach out and touch it, smell its bark, and maybe even wrap your arms around its wide trunk.
That’s what a modern guidebook should feel like, and that’s what we are building — a guidebook for the 21st century.

Patrick Lacz
Founder and principal software engineer of Afield Trails
Patrick is a former Google software engineer and worked on many products from SketchUp to Google Drive and Google Now. He loves sharing the outdoors with his family, playing board games, and getting in the occasional multipitch climb.