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Comment by pengaru | Hacker News Reader

Keep telling enough people about Mt. Langley and you'll find the same problem.

Social media has in my opinion turned this into a shit show. I've done a lot of hiking and camping over the years, and all it takes is enough reviews and "influencers" to talk about some beautiful natural place and seemingly overnight you'll have hoards of people rushing to the view to get their selfie then immediately leave.

It's maddening because these kinds of visitors just generate a lot of traffic to fulfill their shallow objective of collecting a selfie. They largely don't care about what's become of the experience of actually spending time there, because they don't value the experience. It's just getting a photo/video for their $fb_insta_tiktok_whatevers_hot then get back on the road for the next place on the list. At most they're annoyed by delays. It was better when these people stuck to the theme parks.

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This is true for a lot of things like restaurants, but hiking is one of the few areas where I don't think this is the case. People don't just casually decide to summit the tallest mountain in the contiguous US. Everyone there has likely trained on lesser known trails. The thing is, there is only one Whitney, but there are a couple dozen Langley's, and hundreds of even lesser known hikes of similar rigor. If all these become saturated, that's also good because that means Americans wouldn't be so fat!

It's only really a downside for the casuals who will go on Google and hit up one of the top 5 results on Tripadvisor.

As long as it's not not top-ranking or there's a barrier to entry then it will be limited.

Ultimately this is just the new hyper-culture we live in where leisure is now available to tons of people thanks to economics, combined with population growth. The hobbyists who are dedicated will always find new high quality options... just like restaurants/bars/fashion/etc.

Which is probably why having a more liberal system to develop recreational places for the more...casual/friendly audience could be a good thing. At least for getting people to enjoy the outdoors in peace and get out of traffic.

I find this discussion quite interesting. From a German perspective there's almost infinite amount of space in the US for hiking, compared to Germany. You find a lot of great trail in Germany, but if you go to Neuschwanstein (AKA the disney castle) you will find huge American and Chinese tour groups. But most other trails are perfectly fine. I can't imagine with the wide selection in the US to have any problem if you're not going to one of the top 5 search results.

You get a lot of tourists in the US at the top parks as well. It's gotten so bad, many national parks are requiring reservations to get in, something they've never done before.

yeah, there’s some truth to what you’re saying. for years more and more people and culture type scenes have very intentionally “gone dark”

the best places to eat haven’t been on any food app “best of” lists for years.

they haven’t had features written in local foodie sites for years.

all of that shit has been gamed for years by marketing firms.

i mean, does anybody go yell out to the world when they find the best breakfast (and certainly not brunch) in town anymore? hell no. and this thought process isn’t limited to restaurants.

while the restaurants at the top of those lists or in the foodie review sections are of course edible, they’re basically like the Imagine Dragons (or nickelback or peter frampton or whatever mid band from your music generation) of restaurants.

for years and years a lot of bands who absolutely could play clubs have been opting to do DIY basement concert tours with only word of mouth advertising. this has been happening in more and more in all kinds of different scenes, for years.

some of the best new bands i’ve heard in the last few years don’t even use their social media accounts, they sit locked or completely unused.

i know for absolute certain that a tremendous amount of people don’t scream their culture likes out to the world anymore—and for good reason. consciously gone dark, back to word of mouth.

my aunt and i were talking at thanksgiving, she mentioned this is how her and her friends used to do raves—gatekeep it to word of mouth only, if you leaked it, you would lose access to the next party.

I was sympathetic to the pledge until this

> fulfill their shallow objective of collecting a selfie

And then you wrote two more paragraph of judgemental trash to gatekeep how people are supposed to experience views, as if the new generation families and their circles of friends aren't fragmented and use the technology to close the distance.

Yeah, if you ask me, it's pretty legit to take a selfie when you reach a goal, particularly when it's something ultra-scenic like the summit of a mountain!

It's not the selfie taking that's the problem, it's the showing up just to take a selfie and promptly leaving.

When that escalates into a flow of people arriving and immediately departing just to take selfies it's now become a sort of thoroughfare and the natural environment is entirely disrupted in the interests of giving everyone their own bespoke copy of the same view.

At that point you may as well just pave the trail and install a Starbucks at the overlook.

I was talking to a distant cousin in Europe about hiking and how here in BC, you can (with some effort) go up in the forest and be completely isolated from civilization. Heck, you might even lose cell service! He mentioned how he was so frustrated when he'd go on ambitious hikes, feel pretty "alone with nature" and then, at the summit.. there's a pub. There are a couple mountain summits here like that (e.g. Grouse Mountain) but luckily quite a bit of reasonably-"untouched" stuff.

That said, as time goes on you have to go further and further out to experience that "untouched" nature, and I don't see that slowing down anytime soon. The spread of humans is seemingly inevitable, thus the seeking of selfies isn't really a noteworthy aspect. IMO it's a "drop in the bucket" compared to stuff like hyper-available trail map apps/websites with ratings and comments and up-to-the-minute video clips from fellow hikers/offroaders reporting conditions of every possible trail in existence. Stuff that wasn't even known to anyone suddenly becomes the hot new thing overnight because someone added it to one of those apps and called it "the region's best-hidden gem".

and how long do you have to watch the same scenery before you can be classed as not a problem?

besides, the problem is the hoarders that want to take hours watching from the few good spot, preventing access to anyone else because they don't "enjoy it" if they don't transform a spot place into a whole experiencial journey

That's a good point actually. I hiked 20km recently and got to a very scenic waterfall, but not only were my photos of this momentous occasion full of some people who were having lunch with their group right by the waterfall, but also of course I could not access the spot they were at (since they were taking up the whole plateau/rock that acted as a nice plaform). We hung around, drank some water, messed around on the radio, but those people were there before we arrived and stayed after we left. With all that considered, obviously the reality is there are just lots of people who want to see the same cool stuff -- I don't think one can reasonably argue it's "selfie-takers" nor "hoarders", since it's quite subjective what amount of time or experiential indulgence happens to be the optimal acceptable level.

This takes a huge toll on local backcountry/backpacking/canoeing/adventure firms too.

One of my companies’ clients is an almost 30-year old business with a team of almost 15 guides. Each one of them has more than a decade of experience, they’re all Red Cross certified at First Aid, and they hold a large collection of industry specific credentials.

Business was booming for them. Then someone setup shop looking to make a quick buck. The prices are about half, but they bring huge groups out to dangerous spots with no safety equipment and no safety briefings. There have been serious close calls that their group has created with my client’s tour groups, doing stupid things like throwing rocks off areas that are actively being used below by climbers and such.

Sounds like the market doesn't want what your client is offering...

Nah. Their business has grown almost logarithmically over the past few years, even during the pandemic. (Edit: in my original comment my wording suggested their business as has stagnated or plateaued; it hasn’t, but they’re having to fight harder for non-repeat/new clients.)

The problem is SEO and people who see the price difference and don’t know any better.

Repelling down a rock face into a canyon without a helmet? Darwin will sort that segment of the market out fairly quickly, unfortunately.

I don't have the time to look up the URL right now, but you and the GP of this comment should look up the essay on "locust and grasshopper economies"—once customers all have equalized and optimal information access, the best deals of the old days of information asymmetry are no longer feasible.

yikes. I'd recommed trying to be less judgemental. there is no reason others should have to enjoy an experience the same way you do.

conversely i think it's great we're seeing more people able to take advantage of what we all collectively own.

I don't think it's wrong to say that a care for environmentalism, ecology, and conservation are largely lost on the types of 'The Great Outdoors(TM)' social media influencers mentioned here.

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