A Trail Tale
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Role: Music, Ideation, Copy
Awards: FWA Web Award
The Long:
In April 2022, my brother Andy and I set off to hike the Appalachian Trail—a 2,200-mile path from Georgia to Maine. Thousands of blogs, vlogs, and even books have been made covering people’s journey north. We wanted to do something different, so we made, from the ground up, a first-of-its-kind, live-updating, interactive blog.
The site picked up international attention with people all over the world sending us love on the trail. We won the daily and monthly FWA Website Award, beating multiple Fortune-500 companies along the way.
A Trail Tale:
Exhausted by the NFT, pay-to-play world, my brothers, Adam (coder) and Andy (designer), and I wanted to create something that the internet hasn’t seen in a while—a simply enjoyable experience. We also wanted to share the challenges of the Appalachian Trail with everyone around the world. Combining our passions for the outdoors and our unique set of skills, we set out to build A Trail Tale from the ground up.
Every sound, pixel, note, and line of code that brings it all to life, was made by us. Give the album a listen while you scroll through.
Let Me Explain…
The experience is grounded in two very real factors: our Fortitude and Morale. As we go, and encounter things on the trail, we update our experience which positively or negatively impacts our stats—almost like a video game.
Say we see a bird (nature +), but our packs are heavy (encumbered -) and we’re hiking a steep hill (elevation -) our overall mood will drop.
This gives a unique insight into our actual feelings while we’re hiking. You don’t have to read how we’re doing on a blog, simply see through intuitive, visual icons.
Our mood impacts our character’s walking animations and music, adding more immersion into the experience.
We also offer stats, like how many cups of coffee we’ve had, and a map to show how far we come (and how far we have left to go).
Weather & Scene:
The Appalachian Trail cuts through dozens of different scenic biomes—forests, meadows, mountains, etc—so we needed a way to allow the audience to follow along through it all. We created several scenes that update based on our location. Each hand-made scene scrolls for over 15 minutes, giving unique views the entire time.
The weather we face on the trail is also brought into our experience—in real-time. Whatever we’re dealing with on the trail, you’ll be right there with us. The time of day, too, changes as we walk, so you get to see the golden hour light just as we do.
How It Works:
Knowing we’d be on the trail for 6 months, we needed to have a way to easily update the site from our phones. We developed a back-end app that works only for us, giving all the options to update as we went.
That means every asset you see was built prior to the trail. We had to think of hundreds of assets ahead of time. The little pop you hear when you click on a chat icon? That’s a whiskey bottle’s cork—the little things like that brought the experience to life.
Programmatic Path:
There are a… lot of flow charts that went into this, but there’s the general gist.
Reception:
Feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. With minimal (none) advertising, we hit the front page of Reddit with over 23k upvotes, have over 500 daily visitors, and won the daily and monthly FWA Website award.
Additionally, Backcountry launched a special email dedicated to the site and my “top picks” of the trip.
Like what you see?
Stick around and check out some more of my projects.