It’s a beautiful late Spring day and the trail to McAfee Knob is getting lots of foot traffic.
And among every hiker’s gear is their cell phone,
Lindsey Allen and Emma Elmer were just finishing a hike. Both had cell phones within quick reach.
“...Take pictures, that’s my camera, mainly pictures. Yeah, I was gonna say a little safety to be connected back,” they said, completing one another’s thoughts.
They admitted that the two items among their gear they kept closest were their phones and their bear spray.
In fact, more and more people who are looking to get back to nature are taking technology with them.
“Yeah, I keep it pretty minimal. I just have my phone and my Garmin, and then I have just like a charger brick, and I have my, I have like a little running watch just to keep time, and I like to know how many steps I take per day,” said Meg who goes by the trail name Jupiter. She is hiking from Georgia to Maine,
“Well, technology is coming, whether we like it or not,” says Virginia Tech professor Scott McCrickard.
Tech on the trail fascinates McCrickard, who is studying how the use of tech is impacting our outdoor endeavors.
“We want to understand the different types of people that are out there, the different stakeholders and what they want from the trail and need from the trail and how they can support the trail,” McCrickard said.
“I have this app that like identifies all of the like I just saw, like a bunch of lizards, and I got to identify all of them. Yeah, so I use it for that, it was really cool what you can do with plants and trees,” said Elmer.
We found a lizard of our own. I snuck up on it and got video and a good photo. Moments later, and a quick Google search, I learned it was a fence lizard.
The research is more than skin deep. McCrickard and his team asked hikers to use an app that tracks their use of technology while they are on the trail - keeping track of when they use the camera and other apps. And it goes deeper still.
“We went onto Reddit and we scraped Reddit information and then we used Google Maps. So then we had like, okay, at this point, people are happy, at point people are sad,” said graduate student Natalie Andrus, who is working with McCrickard.
And why would you want to know that?
“So today I want to get into my grief journey, and I’m going to be sad here, but then at the end, I’ll be happy. So you can have an informed emotional experience,” Andrus said.
“We also look at social media a lot, social media and trail journals. I’ve got a student who’s wrapping up her PhD that - that looked at trail journals for the last 20 years there and saw how people’s priorities and tech use and cares and emotions sort of changed during their hike,” McCrickard explained.
Meg - trail name Jupiter - takes pictures and posts them on Instagram. And she also uses an app called Far Out - to be aware of dangers not so nature-related.
“If there is someone kind of hanging out of the shelter that’s maybe a little bit sketchy you can see you can’t see that, and you should, within you know, if it’s a week, you know, to avoid that area, you know?” She said.
There is a segment among outdoor enthusiasts who believe nature and technology are a bad mix. Opposites that don’t belong together. People who say the last thing anyone should be doing on the trail is staring at their phone. But McCrickard’s research is showing it’s a natural evolution.
“So maybe we get more people out because of that. Maybe that’s a good thing. More people see nature, more people care about nature, and more people support nature is my hope and belief,” he said.
Andrus even sees technology linking generations.
“So I’ve done two studies. One, within a family, we had three generations: a daughter, a dad, and a grandpa talking. The daughter and dad were on the Appalachian Trail taking videos and sending it back to the grandfather ... I think that there’s value in optimizing technology and I think there’s a value in using the daily use technology to be connected.”
McCrickard is neither an advocate nor a critic of tech on the trail. He’s not pushing to get more Instagrammers out there crowding hot spots for just the right photo. Neither does he want to see ill-prepared hikers taking on the challenge without water and wearing flip-flops. He merely wants to document what’s already happening. And perhaps what’s around the bend.
“We want to understand how these things change and opportunities for education, opportunities for some of the trail organizations to support people, to educate people, and so forth,” he said.