Why I built Trailfold

I only get out backpacking a couple of times a year, and every time I sat down to plan a trip, the existing map tools felt hard to justify — expensive for someone who isn’t on the trail every weekend. Worse, they weren’t really built for backpacking. There was never a good way to plan an overnight or multi-night route with campgrounds marked as their own thing, separate from every other waypoint.

A lot of them were also just unintuitive — clunky, or mobile-only. I wanted to sit down at a desktop, spread the map out, and plan a trip the way I’d actually think about it. And I wanted to do it with people, not alone on a phone screen. So I took inspiration from tools like Figma and built the collaborative, backpacking-specific planner I wished I’d had.

I’ve been backpacking since the 90s. My first trip was Zion National Park when I was ten, and I’ve done Yosemite ten times since. No big thru-hikes yet — the PCT is firmly on the bucket list — but I’ve backpacked in every region of the country. What keeps pulling me back is simple: getting out, being isolated in nature, and just enjoying the outdoors.

That’s really the whole hope behind Trailfold — to make it easier for more people to use a little technology to plan a great trip, and then go get outside.