To answer the question "Why create a Trip Report", you should understand where the need came from and the value it delivers.
Trip reports grew out of a need to respond to people that contacted myself and others about which summits they should do when visiting the area. Some were visiting from other towns, or states, and some were from other countries. I’ve received a lot of requests from people wanting to do summits in my primary area of operations in California and Arizona. When building the new web site, I noticed that a similar capability on the PNWsota.org web site with over 2,000 reports is used heavily.
Trip Reports is a way for people to share more in-depth information about their hike, the summit and other pertinent information and make that information searchable. Using Search, a user can find all the driveups in San Diego (try entering “diego driveup”). We add things like points to save the user time of going to another place to look that up and a way to sort on that. When visiting Los Angeles and being presented with a hundred options, this might help pair down what is doable for the operator.
The Trip Reports feature on W6 SOTA provides the following value:
Allows users new to the area who are visiting to quickly find key info on summits that others have done. Questions like:
How long is the hike?
What is the elevation gain?
Is this a hike, bike, or driveup?Provides ability to quickly search on a known name: For example, they may not be familiar with the region but know to enter “San Diego”, “Los Angeles, or “Yosemite”. (Summits can be tagged to belong to more than one area in our “Folksonomy”).
Next LEVEL: Users can search to quickly find all the known driveups in an area. Or, search on “Los Angeles Bike” and then sort on the Points column. For hikers who only have a short time after their conference, they can sort on RT Miles for a short hike. If they are trying to maximize points per mile, they can quickly figure that out.
A lot of users want to know what the hike is like. Is it a trail, road, use trail, or a wicked bushwhack? Where does the use trail start? Other info, like bring your climbing gear and be ready for a class 4 climb. Or warnings, route not recommended if covered in snow. If it's a driveup, does it require high clearance, or a 4X4?
Should you create a trip report if one already exists? Yes, because everyone has a different perspective, experience and may take a different route or the trail or road conditions change. For example, a summit near San Diego had an easy use trail to the top if you knew where to go but 3+ years later it was hugely overgrown.
Finally, the solution provides an outlet for people that want to share their experience with words and photos in context but don’t have a blog or other media they want to use. The solution is not perfect but it was the best we could do to get people close to what we envisioned for the lowest cost.
