The Instagram Experiment in Ranking Hiking Difficulty (And the Real Top 10 Hardest Day Hikes in America)

What makes a hike “hard”?
Why do some routes feel impossible to one person and casual to another?
And why did our Instagram difficulty experiment got 300,000 views and exploded into a storm of opinions, contradictions, and zero usable data?

In this episode, Philip and Jason pull back the curtain on the Blisterpop Difficulty Scale — the five‑pillar system designed to bring clarity to a world full of noise. They break down why rating difficulty is so challenging, why crowdsourced answers always collapse, and how the scale measures physical load, environmental severity, technicality, logistics, and psychological demand with real structure instead of vibes.

You’ll hear the story of the failed IG experiment, the philosophy behind inclusion and exclusion, and the honest truth about why no difficulty list will ever be complete. This is the definitive conversation about how we understand challenge, risk, and the big days that shape us.

If you’ve ever wondered why some routes feel harder than they score — or why your “easiest” day crushed someone else — this episode is for you.

More at: blisterpopadventures.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:18

All right, this is Off You Pop, the podcast for hikers and adventurers who want to be epic in just one day. Today we're going to have the debate about why defining the hardest day hikes seems to be so decisive in the hiking world, and how my little experiment on Instagram drove 296,000 angry opinions. We're also going to dive into something that we've been working on for a long time the blister pop difficulty scale, why we built it, why we needed it, and why rating the difficulty of a hike is way harder than anyone on Instagram seems to think.

SPEAKER_00 0:56

Yeah, because if you're anywhere near that Instagram experiment we ran, you know exactly what we mean. We posted a simple list. These are the ten hardest day hikes in America. Prove me wrong. And what we got was chaos. It was chaos everywhere. We got opinions, we got feelings, we got vibes, everything except actual factual data and a complete lack of proof of actually completing these hypes, Philip.

SPEAKER_01 1:30

Exactly, and that's the problem. Difficulty isn't a vibe. It's not a mood, it's a system. It's physical load, it's environmental severity, it's technicality, it's logistics and psychological demand all working together. So today we're gonna break it down the scale we've developed step by step. We're gonna talk about what gets included and what gets excluded and why no list, not ours, not anyone's, will ever be complete. And we're gonna go to do it honestly and with all the factual nuance the internet hates. So buckle up.

SPEAKER_00 2:06

This is an episode where we pull back the curtain back on the whole thing, the failures, the framework, the philosophy, and why difficulty matters more than ever.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

All right, Jason, let's get into it. This is off you pop. So first I want to talk about the Instagram experiment that went kind of viral and out of control. And so I was just trying to promote the US 21 hikes that we had created. I I thought, what would happen if I put the top 10 hardest ones out there as the hardest hikes in America and then asked people to prove me wrong. And I knew they weren't the hardest hikes in America. So I was expecting, you know, a little bit of back and forth with some hikers telling me why I was wrong and why this one is harder than that one. But you know, we ranked the hikes already based on the algorithm that we built. So I thought the hikes themselves that were on the list that we had defined as top 10 of our series of 21, at least the order would be right, just because of the way that we had built the algorithm. So I just put it out there. I had a little video of me just walking up a trail and I put the list of the top 10. Now I did make a little bit of a mistake, which was kind of interesting. We could talk talk about sort of the phenomenon.

SPEAKER_00 3:24

Let's talk about it, Philip. Let's talk about that mistake. Let's talk about geography right now.

SPEAKER_01 3:29

Please, I've had enough of it. But so so what I'd accidentally done is I went I went through the hikes and I was listing them on uh on the Instagram post and I was rushing it a little bit. And I asked I a couple of them were in California, or California, California. I guess I wasn't paying attention, and I listed the Grand Canyon was in was in California, and I I heard it like the very first person. You're an idiot, the Grand Canyon isn't in California. Yeah, I know I made a mistake. I'm sorry, you're right. Of course I know it's it's in Arizona, but then like every other opinion was you're an idiot, a Grand Canyon isn't in in California. Are you from California? And all sorts of vitriol towards my minor mistake about where the Grand Canyon was. Maybe that's partly why the post went viral.

SPEAKER_00 4:16

Yeah, and ironically, that's one of the the hikes that we've done, right? Yeah, so yeah, yeah. We actually know where it's at. We didn't drive to California to find that one.

SPEAKER_01 4:27

Somebody suggested that uh maybe maybe uh they hope that I never did the hike because I might die.

SPEAKER_00 4:34

Oh yeah, we have a good interesting stories about that one. I think both uh yourself and I were challenged to our limits on that one, but that was a those stories for a different time.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

But anyway, to to frame, yeah, yeah, just to complete the framing of this, I knew they weren't the hardest hikes in America. But what I wanted to do was say it sparked that debate. Well, then why are they not the hardest hikes? And actually, I got so many comments back after like the third day. I'm like, this is a this is out of control. This is enough. Because what I was getting back were just people's opinions, which was really interesting. It'll be like, what about this hike? What about that hike? This hike is hiker, this hike hike is harder, this hike is harder. And so people were coming back with a lot of hikes that we have in the like our 21 series, but I had them rank like 12th or 18th or 16th, and they're like, no, these are definitely should be in the top 10. And it really says something, right? Because people are giving me opinions about what should be in the top, like the top 10. And I and I come back and I say, Well, no, it's probably 12th, you know. But yeah, I think people were trying to interact, you know. If I'm gonna take these people as being honest and genuine, they're just trying to give me some suggestions about maybe some things I could consider in the top 10. But nobody said this is in the top 10 because XYZ, what do you think about you know ABC? This is the reason why I think this is harder than this. So it's really interesting that people's opinions were being projected onto Instagram of just giving me suggestions, but nobody was giving me facts, which was really interesting.

SPEAKER_00 6:02

Yeah, we had a lot of opinions, but just not a lot of data. And that's one of the things that we kind of try to pride ourselves on how we rank each of the hikes is by as many data points as that we we feel are relevant, really.

SPEAKER_01 6:15

Yeah, I got some crazy stuff too, Jason. It was like we'd ranked rim to rim, and of course I get the inevitable, well, what about rim to rim to rim? That's harder. Yeah, okay, that is, yes, of course. But it was that the the the tone was like, You're an idiot, this one's harder. You don't know what you're doing. So part of the part of the issue was, you know, it's it's Instagram, so I got like, you know, 20 words to make it happen. So I didn't explain, you know, what my inclusion and exclusion criteria were in were in the list, which I think if I'd sort of done that and just said, how about for these 10, did I rank them in the right order? It might have been a different conversation. But I did get a whole bunch of new suggestions about what people thought the hardest hikes were. So that was that was very interesting. So let's let's talk about you know why rating difficulty in hiking is is so hard. You know, I'm gonna I'm gonna put it to you, you Jason, that it's because it's based on our own personal experience of the hikes that we've done. So I didn't say I, for example, on Instagram, nobody said I've done all 10 of these hikes, and this is what I think. I think people have done two or three of them, and because they've done them, that's like uh their recency experience, right? I've done these three, so they must be the that must be harder than these things you're putting out there, which is interesting. So I don't know what you think about, you know, having that your own, you know, I've done this once, so I know all about it phenomenon.

SPEAKER_00 7:45

Yeah, definitely. That's really where the challenge comes in, is there's so many different points to look at other than just how far or how much altitude. For the longest time, I've kind of really veered in that direction that those were the only things that mattered. But since we've started working on these bigger, broader scales with the company and these hikes, there's so many more data points that go into evaluating the hike and putting it up into a list other than just the physical load or the altitude gain. And that's really what this focus starts to become right now that we're gonna lead into.

SPEAKER_01 8:24

Yeah, you know, you know, the other the other trouble is in some ways, the difficulty of a hike really depends on the experience that you're having on the day. So for me, it's like your personal experience that you're having. So your personal fitness level and how you're feeling on that day. Maybe you're feeling a little off, a little sick, you didn't sleep so well, or you're not just you're not your fittest, or you're fit for one hike and then you're comparing it to another hike where you are much fitter. And so I'm sure you've had hikes where you've gone out there and thought, oh my god, this is just kicking my butt. I'm just so I haven't I haven't exercised for a month or whatever, or I've just got over some sort of illness, and this is this is tough, and it's not actually that tough of a hike if you were you know feeling good that day.

SPEAKER_00 9:04

Absolutely. It's that variance that is it's unpredictable in each individual hiker. That's really why you want to kind of rank these hikes off data points that don't don't change and that aren't subject to each individual hiker. But I know that there's been times that me and you have been on hikes and I've been having a bad day, and I thought I was on my last win, and you're just skipping along like it's the easiest day in the world. And it's that same philosophy. We were both on the same hike. We're both have relatively similar skills, but because of my day prior or just my preparation, you were just in a better headspace than me.

SPEAKER_01 9:44

You know, and the other the other challenge is the weather really does change the nature of a hike, especially when you're on the west coast, just sort of getting up into altitude where the snow really plays uh plays a factor. You know, the the the day that you do the hike or even the season that you do the hike can really change the difficulty of a hike. You you like I'll give you a couple of examples. You know, if you go do Mount Whitney in January and you're doing the Mountaineers route and it's all covered in snow and ice, that's a nightmare hike. You do it in September in the fall, beautiful hike. You know, you go do you go do a Grand Canyon in July, hell, an oven. You do it in the you know, you do it in October, what a beautiful stroll in in the canyon. So that's that's the difficult thing to capture. And I think you know, when we we're when we're thinking about building the algorithm, what we're really trying to do is is to try and capture the severity of that hike during the seasons, not just you know, the what not just a perfect condition, you know, in in mid-May or you know, late October where it's all just beautiful and great, but what what are the extreme weathers that you could encounter and what the what are those challenges? And then I think you know, part of the other challenge is the technicality of the hike itself. And I think people overlook that. And I'll give you a little example. So we went off trail a couple of months ago, a little short hike out in the desert here. It was about seven miles, round trip, about 3,000 feet, but it was all off trail, it was all technical. And there was, you know, a lot of scree running, there was a little bit of scrambling. That is a whole different hike than you know going on a trail. And I will I will say that little hike was tough. It was really difficult and challenging compared to me going up Mount Whitney on a on a trail. You know, that was a for me, that was a breeze. But going off trail, trying to navigate and find your way up a mountain through Scree, that's that's a tough day.

SPEAKER_00 11:37

Yeah, that off-trail hiking, you've gotten me on some of those and just the amount of effort that is required when you're off trail and you're doing some different scrambles that people aren't thinking about. It's not just a line on a map, but it's so much more once you get out there and you start in the environments from being up on my, what was it, frill peak, where it's all complete sand at the top, and you start getting on the descent down, you're sliding down, and just navigating that for miles at a time. It was just it was just grueling on the legs. It's something you wouldn't expect when you're just looking at it on a map.

SPEAKER_01 12:15

I I don't want to discount altitude because you know uh some of our hikes, all of the you know, the most beautiful hikes in the U.S. are happening above 10,000 feet. And then altitude starts being a factor, but altitude affects everybody differently and differently on different days. It's really hard to um predict how you're gonna how you're gonna react on any one day to high altitude. So that really messes with people's minds too. I think you've been up to every space camp. I don't know how you cope with the altitude up there, but I was I was struggling over 15,000 feet. I was having a hard old time.

SPEAKER_00 12:47

Yeah, definitely. I think that was the there's a reason why we were on it in one day at a time. And it was we had to get that. I think it started to really hit me after about 13,000 feet is really where I needed every one of those climatation days to kind of get my bearing and moving forward.

SPEAKER_01 13:04

So, you know, that's that's sort of the personal individualized, you know, what's going to happen any one day on a hike. It really makes it difficult to pinpoint a score, and it really does impact, you know, your individual perception of how difficult a hike is. Now, if you did that hike on multiple times or multiple days, maybe you'll have a better sense of it. But nobody's got time to do, you know, the same hike five times and compare it to another hike doing it five times. So it does kind of, it just skews your perception of how difficult any one hike is. And so I think what we tried to do is develop an algorithm that's sort of independent of your own, those personal things that happen to you on any one day, just to try and create a clean scoring system that gives you sort of a more of a an unbiased opinion of what the hardness of hardest hardness of a hike is so you can compare it to other hikes when you consider all these or take out these other factors. So maybe I walk, let's start walking through what we've included when we think about difficulty. And then maybe that'll help people understand on Instagram that we're not just insane, that we've really thought through this. And and and that's really I guess that's really the debate I wanted to have on Instagram is what not what not name the hikes that you think are hard, but what is it that defines hardness in a hike? That's probably the question I should have asked, but maybe it wouldn't have gone viral.

SPEAKER_00 14:22

Hey, what's unless I said the Grand Canyon wasn't parallel, right? We're looking now, we're trying to figure out what the people, all those people that had those opinions, what are the data points that they're looking at as they're creating this thought process? And the reality of it is we know that they're probably not, they're probably just using their own experiences to rank these hikes in their mind, but they're not actually using the data points that we're kind of looking at that you're going to talk about in this algorithm.

SPEAKER_01 14:54

Yeah, and I I don't want to discount real world experience, which I I think why there's there's some value to putting this out there and then listening to people understanding what they think about this, because real world experience is evidence. And if you get Q, you if 10, 10, 15 people are telling you the same thing, then that's sort of creating some evidence about whether the algorithm is working or not. But they have to understand how we're ranking before they can pass a judgment. And I didn't certainly put that out there on Instagram. So let's let's walk through it. So we've got five different factors that we're ranking, and it's a hundred-point system, and we sort of weighted each of these factors. And I think the weighting is kind of important too. So I want you, if you're listening, I want you to think about that weighting and if that really rings true with you when you think about the difficulty of a hike. So the first thing that we rank is we're calling it physical load, and we we're scoring our hikes from naught to 40. So this is like the engine room, and I think this is really the traditional way that people are thinking about difficulty. And so what we're looking at is distance, uh, vertical gain, the altitude, you know, sort of the cumulative fatigue of the trail. And so for us, the one that really tops the scales are Shorty's World to Telescope Pig or Cactus to Clouds to Cactus. And they're like 30, 40 miles, they're 10,000 feet in third in one day, they're like extreme end of what your body can cope with any one day. And then you sort of move down the scale and you think comparatively like the devil's path in New York, that's 22 miles and 8,000 feet, but there's no altitude involved. So, you know, how do you how do you match those factors against each other? And so I'll just give you a little example of what how we're scaling or ranking these so you can get an idea of what we're thinking about. So, like if you for physical load, if there's a score between 35 and 40, that's an extreme physical effort. So you can think of like 10,000 feet of gain in one day, 30 to 40 miles, it's extreme vertical, and there's major altitude exposure. So you're over 10,000 feet when you get into the top of the mountain. That's sort of the upper pinnacle of the you know, the physical piece. And then as you come down, maybe 30 to 34 points, it's a big old mountain day, 7,000 to 10,000 feet in gain, maybe 20 to 30 miles, and it's just sustained climbing all day. And if you drop down another tier, maybe the score is 26 to 29, a long old demanding day, 5,000 to 7,000 feet, 18 to 25 miles. And you can imagine, you know, we've ranked and scored these tiers, you know, down to just a stroll in my local park, you know, one point basically. But you know, I think we're I think it's important, right? We're trying to build a structure around how you evaluate, not just your opinion. Uh I think we got like I I think I've evaluated maybe 10, 20 different hikes that are more than 30 miles long, but they range all the way from you know from like 18 points out of 40 to 40 points out of 40. Because it's not just the distance, you know, it's a combination of these things that makes that hike difficult.

SPEAKER_00 17:51

And definitely that's where we're trying to really get in that physical load. It's like, man, I what's the last one we've done that's in a 3540 range?

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Oh, I tried to do short as well to telescope peak. That would have picked me out at around 34, but I got to 27 miles in the end on that one. But yeah, I mean they're long, they're long days when you're going 30 plus days. Yeah. So the so the and I really think this is what people think when they're thinking in their head how hard was that day. It was X miles or it was X thousand feet in game, or it was, you know, Y altitude. And that's what I think everybody's really focusing on when they think about how hard the hike is. Obviously, they're doing the hike and they're experiencing the toughness and hardness of the hike themselves from a physical perspective, what's happening to them and their body and how the day felt as they went through it. So it's certainly not anything to be discounted. I think I think I I think a weighting of 40 is is adequate. You know, it's not all of the points, it's slightly less than half points, if you like. So the next factor, and I think this is the one that people don't necessarily think about, is the environmental severity. And so we gave that 25 out of 100. And I'll tell you what, this is the thing I think that really matters on the mountain. So you think about the weather, the extremes of the weather, the heat, the cold, the wind, and your exposure to the elements. And by exposure, I mean, you know, if you're in a forest and you're covered, you know, you're under tree cover, that's very difficult different than being on an exposed ridgeline. You think about Humphreys in Arizona where we got caught in that in that lightning storm, if you're out on the ridge, that's a killer. If you can get down off the mountains and you're in the tree line, that's different. So that's really what that that means. And uh I think people completely underestimate this when they think about the difficulty of a hike. And maybe it's because it's they did the hike on a nice day, but that's not always the case. And when we're talking about the difficulty of a specific hike and comparing it to the difficulty of another specific hike, I think this really, really matters. And this is the stuff that people should be thinking about because it's the stuff that will kill you. It'll ruin your hike, it'll make it so difficult and so challenging that it doesn't matter what you compare it to. You know, if you go to the presidential range and try and climb Mount Washington in January, that's gonna be a living nightmare, you know. But you have to factor that somehow into the into the rating and the ranking. And I think that's what our score might do that's a little bit different than people just thinking about when I hiked it, it was a tough day.

SPEAKER_00 20:15

And it's it's still one data point of the five that were used to create the score that can change really quick, right? It can change on the mountain, meaning the weather can change on a mountain just in a heartbeat, and you're stuck to having to adjust and figure a way through that. And a lot of people would never even think about how maybe I should incorporate that into how difficult that hike was, right?

SPEAKER_01 20:42

Yeah, yeah, I th I think so. And I I think I what I want to try and do with this difficulty scale is give people some perspective on how hard this hike could be if I go on the wrong day. And and and considering this is a major part of the score is important because that presidential traverse, people like knock it a lot. They've given it a lot of uh lower scores. I think there are other hikes in like New Hampshire and then and in New England that deserve higher weightings. But Mount Washington on the wrong day, it's like got some of the strongest winds on earth, I think. And it kills a lot of people. It's a lot of rescues that have to happen on Mount Washington and along that traverse, just because it's so exposed, there's so much high wind, it's so difficult to bail out. I guess because there's a road up to Mount Washington, you go in the summer, people kind of discount that. And I bet I bet a lot of people are doing it in the summer too, which kind of maybe makes them think it's a little bit easier.

SPEAKER_00 21:32

Yeah, definitely. Makes me think like what would be a good time to do, you know, the rim to rim, Philip. Not July. Not July. That's a good special note on our FAQ's of Blister Pop website, huh?

SPEAKER_01 21:47

Yeah, don't don't do the rim to rim in July. Yeah, Jay Jason and I did rim to rim in July and it was a mistake. I think we uh crawled out of the pit of hell and barely made it. So Barely made it. So the third, the third factor that I think is important for people to figure figure out. And we sort of touched on it before, is the technicality of the hike. And when I mean technicality, we're talking about how much scrambling is there? How difficult is the footing? Are there places where there's some serious consequence? Like there's where you could fall off of the trail because of the where the trail goes. There could be big cliffs that you could fall off. And you've got to think about things like the class rating of different types of scrambles. And so, you know, there's there's some great trails in national parks that are beautifully maintained. And then there are other trails that are a little bit more obscure that go sort of off trail and you're scrambling. That's a whole different ball game. And that needs to be factored into this and it needs to weigh into the overall difficulty. So we gave that a weighting of 15. And interestingly, there's a there's a peak on here that we put in our top 10 that people keep discounting. They keep saying there's harder things to do in Colorado. And maybe there is, but this peak has a has a particular type of scrambling that puts it way at the top. It scored 15 on the scale, and it's long's peak via the keyhole. And a lot of it is off trail. There's some technical moves, there's some places you can fall off. That makes it real tricky. Whereas, and this is what people don't realize, rim to rim, that score's a four. It's a smooth old trail all the way. We've done it. It's smooth. Smooth, easy to follow, not very technical, right? No scrambling. Benches are park benches on the way you can sit and have a have a nap on, you know. It's just not that technical. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I I think that that warrants a fairly, you know, a fairly good conversation and consideration when you're ranking the difficulty of hike. So then the fourth, and this one, people completely I I got kind of poop hard on this on the Instagram, I have to say. Logistics and the commitment. I've given that 10 points. I got a weighting of 10. And this is this is about you know permits, how scarce water is on any one trail, how remote the trail is, how easy is it to bail out? It's sort of about getting there or getting out if you need to, you know, the water scarcity, how much water I need to carry with me that adds to the difficulty. If there's no water, you have to carry five, six liters of water. That's difficult. How remote is the hike? How hard, how far away is help if you get in trouble? How committed are you when you go do this hike? And the classic, Shoreline's World's Telescope Peak, that's in the alluvial fan, in the middle of the desert. The day I did it, we had to drive two hours because the road got washed out. And when you're there, nothing. It's like being on the moon. There's no water out of water. It's like you are committed 100%. There's no bailout, it's just you and the desert. And if you hit the timing wrong, you come back and you have to bail out into Death Valley when it's 120 degrees, forget about it. You're gonna die. It's complete commitment. And that's why that one gets 10 out of 10. And then people think, Oh, yeah, what about half dome on the mist trail or rim to rim in the Grand Canyon? They're in a national park, there are rangers, there's a ton of people around. That's a whole different level of difficulty. It's not just about the grind, man. You know, it's about how exposed and how dangerous it is if something goes wrong. That's that's what I think is important about the logistics. Even even this thing, which kind of it won't it wound me up a little bit on the Instagram to be honest, Jason. Somebody was comparing a loop hike to a shuttle hike, and saying, Oh, the loop, the loop, the loop was harder. I said, Yeah, but you didn't think about the logistics. Like getting a shuttle is is challenging. You have to arrange the shuttle. That adds a little bit to the difficulty of it. What if the shuttle doesn't work out and you're stuck and you have to walk back from the shuttle? It just adds to the logistical challenges of it. And the shuttle, you have to be here at a certain time and blah, blah, blah. The loop just you just drive and you show up and you go. It adds to the difficulty, it has to be a part of the factor.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

And it also incorporates into that major, you know, on the major ones of waiting in line to get that permit, right? Trying to make sure that you can score that permit and get on that mountain properly.

SPEAKER_01 25:54

And yeah, and then the final thing, I love this one, is the psychological demand. And this is about is this a scary hike or not? And what are the things that kind of drive fear in a hike? So it's exposure. There might be sections where there's huge drop-offs. That's kind of scary. The general fear factor of this hike, the mental grind of the day, like some of these hikes on the East Coast, where you're going up and down and up and down, it's just mentally taxing and psychologically demanding. And then how where are you? How isolated are you in the world? Like how how out there are you should things go wrong? How how how afraid is this hike gonna make you when you do it? Just a couple of comparisons, like the knife edge on Catarden, that's gonna be a nine. That's major exposure, ridgeline running, scary type of hike. And then strolling on the lost coast in California, that's just a five. So nothing, not even comparable from a psychological factor. So you add them up, get a score out of 100, and then we have classified them into tiers, uh, six tiers, easy and moderate, that's sort of under 50. They're run-of-the-mill, four or five-hour hikes. And then that's where we're really getting into the game. I got hard, very hard, brutal, and extreme. And because we've given it a score, it's transparent, right? This is the score for this hike. And you can see on the trading cards, just for the 21 we started with, and we will expand the pack, is you can see the score on the back. Like this is the this is how we're rating each of these. And actually, it's on the website, you know, on the Blister Pop Adventures website. I put the difficulty rating out there, and you can see it, and you can see that how the different factors are rated. Because that's that's really the interesting thing. It's not a score out, just a random score out of 100. This one's 99, this one's 50. It's it's how you score each of the different factors to get to that overall score. And it's transparent, it's repeatable, and you can compare different hikes. And then you can argue, you know, this one's harder, you know, physically, this one's harder, but you know, psychologically, that one's harder. That that's a better conversation, right, about the difficulty of a hike, not just a single, I I went on this hike and I thought it was hard the day I did it. You know, that's a it's a whole different mindset when you think about it that way. And it's it's evidence, right?

SPEAKER_00 28:07

It's evidence. Evidence and it's a whole deeper conversation about the hike, right? And that's what we're trying to really entail that everybody had these opinions and we just wanted to explain to everybody this is a data we're using to come up with ours. They're not just our opinions. We're sitting and throwing darts at a board that we're actually using some data to quantify these and put them into a list. And it's a list that I don't know, Philip, is the list gonna constantly be changing?

SPEAKER_01 28:40

So it's a great segue. So I didn't say what what I included and what I excluded from the hike list. And so what I included what for the Instagram experiment was just the hikes that we had put together, which I thought were the most iconic hikes in the US. Like if I if I had to start from scratch in my bucket list and draw out 21 hikes that I thought were the most iconic hikes I definitely want to do in my lifetime across the US, that were sort of the quintessential definition of a hard day hike in the US, that was these 21. That doesn't mean they were the hardest or they score the score the hard the hardest. It's just the ones that everybody talks about, it's the ones on everybody's bucket list, it's it's but it cut it's a cross-section across all of America. So I kind of had to spread them out. I couldn't have like 20 in Southern California. Of course, there are some really hard hikes in Southern California, but I didn't want like five of the 21 to be in Southern California. So we sort of spread them out and we sprinkled in. We had to make some tough decisions for the US 21. But you know what I did after the Instagram experiment? I said, you know what? Let me rerun the experiment and let me p try and figure out what the top 100 hardest hikes are in America. Yeah. But I had to do it in such a way that I set some criteria. What were we going to include and what were we not going to include? And so I didn't define that when I put the Instagram post in. That would maybe have made the people less angry. So let's let's talk about what got included. So it had to be a day hike, right? You had to do it in a day. Obviously, you know, the Appalachian Trail, that's the hardest day hike in America. Yeah. It's not the hardest day hike, but it's the hardest trail in America. So and it had to be reasonably done in a day. Some people who trail run, fast pack, like the the one percenters might be able to do some hikes that some of the people were suggesting in a day, but they're not normally done in a day. And so it's it's trying to figure out is it possible in a day? So I kind of set the limit of 50 miles. If it was over 50 miles, most people are not going to be able to do over 50 miles in a single, you know, day push. And so that actually knocked some of the ones that people suggested from Instagram out of the list. And then some people were throwing up some things in there that really required some like technical mountaineering, glacier, you know, crossing glaciers, canyoneering, ropes, class five scrambling. Like that's not a day hike. That's a that's a mountaineering experience. That's a different thing than just going for a day hike. So I had to pull a bunch of those out, and that dropped a lot of the like a lot of a lot of hikes that people were suggesting, or I sourced off the internet that could technically be done in a day, were just technical mountaineering hikes, not day hikes. There were some people who put multi-day routes in there, and like I said, it has to be done in a day. I had to make some difficult decisions in the top hundred as well. Some people were putting some really obscure things in, maybe things that they strung together on their own. I needed a I needed a bit of popularity to the hikes. And so they had to be sourced on the internet and have information on them. We'll talk about that in a minute, why that's important. But there have to be hikes that people want to do, right? People that people know and have heard of, not just some weird thing I put together out here in the desert that nobody's ever heard of, but it's really hard because I just strangle the pigs together in a weird way. And it kind of it kind of had to at least be a recognized trail. It couldn't be all off-trail. This isn't off the hardest off-trail day hikes. It has to be a trail of sorts. And I really wanted to get away from my hardest day ever. This is the hardest day I ever had. That's not a metric. So that's really the the way that we define what we included versus excluded and to put that list of 100 together. And I will say it's kind of curated. It's sort of crowdsourced, it's sort of the things I know and I like, but it's sort of also let's go, let's go and try and figure out these hikes. And so there were some things that were close together and that were similar that I cut out of the list. I was trying to create this sort of overall 100 across the United States. So there might be some things in there a little obscure. So people will be able to come in and say, these aren't the 100, this one's harder, that one's harder, this one's harder, that one's harder. But at some point you have to define 100, right? Because there are thousands and thousands and thousands of thousands of hikes. So I'm not saying the hundred that I put together is the definitive list, but I think it would be the most popular list. I'm going to say that, and most um recognizable list of the what a hundred hikes might be.

SPEAKER_00 33:12

So how are we going to be sharing that list, Phillips?

SPEAKER_01 33:16

Well, we'll get to that in a bit. I want I want I want you to understand that this Instagram post came out five days ago and I got a full-time job and I ranked 100 hikes. Because that's how how the hell did this guy do that? And so I got to talk about the elephant in the room. Let's talk about it. So the elephant in the room is that we design an algorithm. We didn't go and rank any of these hikes. I did not score any of these hikes. I just said this is the algorithm that I think defines what a hard hike is, and this is what I think the scoring should look like and how that should be defined. That's the thing that is arguable in the way that I built this. What I did is what everybody's doing these days, I loaded the algorithm into AI and said, run this against your large language models, go out to the data sources, and score the hikes. And so I was able to rapidly score all of the hikes. So it's not me or my personal bias, it's the AI model working. And you know, it tells me where it's sourcing, you know, it's sourcing from all trails from different hiking magazines, blogs, and other internet sources to create these scores. And so what I wanted to do with the IG thing was see, does the algorithm stand up to the to the masses' opinions? But the experiment was obviously flawed because they weren't really the 10 hardest day hikes, which is a bit a bit of an issue. And we'd really curated them about their popularity and uh and uh their beauty overall. And I wanted to spark a debate about what makes a hard hike, but it really devolved into a list of all the hikes that I excluded, bang statements about what an idiot I am for creating this terrible list. And then nobody actually offered any proof to stand by their rationale, and some had done the hikes, but it's just it just devolved into chaos and not anything meaningful. So, like I said, uh then I took the algorithm. I said, you know what, I'm gonna make a hundred hardest hike list in America. Not my opinion, and the scores and the ranking I put in those 10 were not my opinion. It's what does the algorithm do when it sources all the information from the internet? You know what all the information is from the internet, right? It's people's opinions about these hikes, it's their blogs, it's magazine journalists, it's the all trail scoring and stuff. It's all the aggregate and averaging of that to create this score. It's not me, I'm not the idiot, it's AI. Well, that's the elephant in the room, right? Because we know there are flaws in AI and large language models. You know, there's some there's a there's the real risk of the AI hallucinating, especially if it has missing data points. And somebody, there's a risk that it's making up some of these scores. And I did see some of the evidence in that. Uh like I would see a score and I thought that doesn't feel right to me. I know a lot about this hike, and that score feels too low or too high. And so I added some iterative logic to it. I said, think deeper about this hike, and it would come up with sometimes it would order its score and say, you know what, I didn't think about X, Y, Z, but often it would come back and say, no, it would stand by its score and say, you know, this is the score and this is why. And it would give me the logic as to why it came up with that score. So not only does the matrix enable me, the scoring matrix enable me to like quickly put together the score of any hike, it also enables me to give that rationale. Like, hey, how did we score this to get how do we get to this score? Give me that rationale as to why it is. So if anybody comes to me and says, no, this one's wrong, I can say, well, this is why it got scored that way, or why the algorithm scored it that way. But I still think those scores are wrong. I'm gonna put it out there. The scores are wrong because you know and I know that if you are using AI for this stuff, you need humans in the loop, right? You need the humans to validate the data. The problem is the humans are not thinking about this algorithm. They're thinking about how it felt on that day they did the hike. So the humans are also flawed. So I don't know what you do about that, right? It's really the probabilist our score of using the algorithm, using AI, whichever AI model you want to do. It's the probabilistic average of what it's pulling from all of these reports, and which also includes people's personal experiences. So that's why there's some real challenges here. And I I think I could put these hundred hikes out there and you would people will debate and dispute them. And I'm not gonna I'm not gonna say they're wrong, because it's really a mix there has to be some coming together of the AI and the humans who've done the hikes to get to a real, you know, definitive score. So that's why I think it's really hard to to rank the hikes. So I don't know what you think, Jason, about you know, AI and using this algorithm or normal you think some of the uh challenges are.

SPEAKER_00 37:56

I it was just the interaction we got on Instagram was it was I we j we were having conversations and joking about it. It was just I didn't understand it and really what this is doing now is in those conversations where people actually have strong opinions, we're able to present data that the AI model is giving us as how it's coming up with this information. And now we can logically have a conversation with them and be like, Well, what's your data? Like w what are the points that are you're so passionate about, or was it just the day that you did that hike? You were just having a really bad day. Yeah. Or, you know, and we're trying to factor all those in so people are in knowledge and have an understanding of what to expect as they go on these hikes. So that's really what we're trying to do is prepare hikers and individuals before they go out and take on these journeys.

SPEAKER_01 38:53

I got this beautiful comment from somebody really early on in like the the consciousness stream of Instagram, and I thought, this guy's so rude. He said this, he said, never rank, dude. Like, what does he mean? And then it just exploded. I'm like, oh yeah, never rank. I thought he was like personally attacking me, and he's like, he must have seen this type of post before go go nuts. So that was a really interesting experiment. So, you know, I don't think the list and the scoring is definitive, but I really do want to get to a point where we're getting to a place where everybody sort of has a framework for understanding what makes the difficulty of a hike. And I think that really ultimately is to help people on the trail understand, you know, why such and such a hike is going to be really, really difficult compared to another hike because it kind of helps people prepare. You we see these people get in trouble all the time because they don't understand why the hike is difficult. So many, I keep going back to Whitney, I don't know why it's not it's but so many, I guess because so many people have Whitney as a as a goalist, and so many people, I don't think they understand what makes it difficult and what makes it challenging. And if they don't understand that, then they don't I'm not sure that they're preparing right for the trail. Because I don't I didn't think the trail was that difficult at all. It wasn't that technical, it wasn't hard to get lost, didn't have to prepare for navigation or any of that. What what I needed to prepare for was the altitude on that one. That was the killer piece, but I didn't understand that because people just say that it's a hard hike or it's a really very strenuous hike. I also I also guess I kind of got mad when I go to all trails or some websites, and people say, you know, there's some sort of ranking of a hike, there's a a rating of a hike anyway, on a lot of these apps. Well, this hike is hard or this hike is strenuous, it doesn't mean anything. And I've done so many hikes where I've gone, oh, this is a hard hike, it's like a three-hour hike. This is not a hard hike. So I think it you know, it helps you train better, helps you make better decisions ultimately. And uh I think we've spent all this time now talking about what makes a hard hike. I should probably give people the top 10 out of the hundred, because I'm not gonna list all hundred of these hikes. We'll get something out on the website or in the blog. Uh, some access to the hundred that we ranked at some point. Uh probably won't be for a month or two because I've got some exciting travel coming up. But uh here is the definitive top 10 list. Now I'm gonna say how I made the list. I'm gonna make it perfectly clear to everybody. We use the inclusion and exclusion criteria that we mentioned before. We have our US 21 hikes that we've already put together. I what I actually went through is I pulled all of the comments out of that Instagram post of all the hikes that people said were hard. And I added those to the list. And then I worked with the scale and with the internet to try and look at different regions of the country to pull in more and more hikes that could potentially make the top list. And then I excluded things that didn't fit the uh fit the inclusion and exclusion criteria and just went through them and ranked them all and just tried to think weed out things that didn't seem to fit. And so it's a little bit curated, it's a little bit data-driven, a little bit AI, a little bit Phillip driven, you know. Um, but this is the list, and people were gonna disagree with this list as soon as I put it out there.

SPEAKER_00 42:07

Do we need a drummall?

SPEAKER_01 42:10

I'm sure. Number one, or should I start from number 10? Number 10. I'm gonna start from I'm gonna go from the number 10 to number one. Number 10, Mount Marathon, the Four Ridge Traverse in Alaska. 77, Brutal. Number nine, Rabbit Peak in California. People don't know this one. It's the hardest hike almost in San Diego, but it's out there in the desert. It's a tough day. Number eight, Mount Ridder Tabana, the scramble variant. This one's down in the high Sierra. This one's near the Palisades. It's a tough one. People suggested the Palisades, Jason, and I had to cut them out because they're too tough. They're mountaineering routes. This one's real close to that area, but you can just about hike it.

SPEAKER_00 42:55

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 42:56

Number seven, Long's Peak, the keyhole route. The one that people keep bashing, but the scrambling makes it real, and the exposure makes it real. This one wasn't on my radar at all. Number six, Satan's Ridge Traverse in Colorado. Uh, just topped out the keyhole route. So there is a tougher hike in Colorado than the Long's Peak. It's the Satan's Ridge Traverse. Number five, Cactus to Clouds, the Cactus to Clouds to Cactus version, the out and back version. You know, that that mega one that takes you back into the desert in the boiling hot afternoon. That one made its number number five. Number four, the Great Range Traverse in New York. Again, this one's just fully exposed and out there. It's tough. It's tough in the winter, it's tough in the summer. People are gonna love this one. Number three, Grand Canyon, the one in Arizona, not the one in California, and the rim to rim to rim version, not the rim to rim version. So that'll keep the that'll keep those folks happy that we uh that we put rim to rim to rim up in number three. And actually, just for comparison, rim to rim, number 25. So that'll keep those folks a little happier. Uh number two, and this one's so controversial. Number two is the presidential traverse, the one that goes over Mount Washington, just because of the death factor there, that winter difficulty, that exposure really pushes it out there. And the PEMI loop is only at 37. And I got a lot of pushback. The PEMI loop is harder than the presidential traverse. And I'm gonna make another Instagram post about that to course. That seems like the one you got to address separately. Oh, absolutely. And number one, short as well to telescope peak, the out and back, the quintessential hardest day hike in America. It starts at minus 230 feet and finishes up at 11,000 feet. It's in Death Valley. There's no water, there's no bailouts, it's completely committed. It's a 34-mile day, it's you know, 11,500 feet up and back down again. And having attempted it, it's a beast and it deserves to be to be number one. So that's it, the divinitive top 10. We've got the top 100, and we'll definitely get those out on the web in the next month or two. But hopefully this is a useful discussion because I don't see this discussion anywhere. I just get all these articles of people ranking what they think are the hardest hikes, or these were these are some of the hardest heights. I think this is the list, and I'm prepared to stand by it. I'm also prepared to accept criticism and you know this is somewhat AI driven, and I'm aware the of the weaknesses of AI, but it's also not bias. It's not just my opinion, you know, it's based on all the data that's out there.

SPEAKER_00 45:41

Yeah. I mean, if anything, we have a starting point now. We have the data out there. Now we can start having the conversation about this list, and everybody can give their input. More importantly, it's we're having a system now to start ranking these hikes. As people bring them up, we can drop them into the list and drop them into the algorithm and see where they rank. And we actually have something to quantify it and share with our you know, our users. I guess that's really where it comes down to. What are your thoughts on doing shorty wells again? When are we gonna tackle that one?

SPEAKER_01 46:20

It is so on the list. I learned, you know, whenever you do a hike and you fail it, you learn so much. You learn you learn to adapt and adjust. So I don't I don't finish all the hikes I do. I I probably fail a couple a year for different reasons, usually related to the weather. But I learned a lot on that hike and uh I definitely want to do it. I know exactly where I failed and why I failed, and uh, I know I could uh give it a better shot next time. But it's uh it's not a summer hike.

SPEAKER_00 46:46

Absolutely, absolutely. Well, I'll be ready. I won't miss it this time. That was I missed the first uh try, but this second time we'll be knocking it out together.

SPEAKER_01 46:55

Well, thanks everybody for listening to this. Hopefully it's uh some positive conversation about the difficulties of hiking and how to how to rank them. And that uh we can rank dude at one day. Now, off your pop.