Call for trail journals!

Please consider that many thru hikers may not keep a journal. This should be considered in your study.

My style might be 10 to 40 photos with a phrase, or a one or possibly two sentence caption.

Thanks for the tips everyone!

I actually don't necessarily need detailed or well-maintained journals. I am using text analysis software that allows me to control for things like length and level of detail. Even a few sentences or keywords jotted down along the trail can help! It is also not necessary to have daily entries. As long as there are some that were written during (relative) isolation, for example hiking alone and maybe having a few short encounters with some strangers on the trail, and some that were written during a period of more extensive social interaction, like hiking or camping with a group of people or even pre- or post-departure updates. The most important thing is that they were not edited or written after the fact.

We are also in the process of gathering journals that were published online, including on the website BlueBear mentioned. However, it is not always possible to determine when they were written. Some people will write as they go and then upload when they can, while others write up their experiences from the last few days once they get a chance to upload, or write afterwards. This is often not made explicit in the text. I hope to get around that issue by contacting people directly, as I am doing now, and getting confirmation from them that what they are submitting was written as they went along. I might also reach people who did not want to publish their private journal online, but who would be ok with sharing it for this project.