Does anyone know of a list of hiking forums catering to local areas? These are the most useful places to find good backpacking trails in a region.. but it is hard to learn of these forums if you are from far away.

For example:

Pacific NorthWest -- nwhikers.net

NY / New England -- viewsfromthetop and several ADK (Adirondack) forums: http://www.adkhighpeaks.com/forums/
http://www.adkforum.com/

Is there a list of such websites somewhere? (At the moment, I'm looking for info on Maryland, Virginia and West Virginia..)

MD/VA/WV hikes:

http://www.midatlantichikes.com/

That would be great. I'd like to see something for Arizona, Nevada and Utah. Sorry I couldn't be of any assistance.

A wiki or a plain website listing forums and that people can add to would be very useful to me.

Unfortunately I'm not too savvy about creating websites... but let's see. Maybe I'll find someone to do it.. Google is helpful but sometimes it's hard to find the good forums easily.

Trails.com, while not a forum, is a good hike-planning resource for all states within the U.S. It's subscriber-based (and no, I don't have any affiliation with the site other than as a subscriber).

I signed up for the 2 week free membership (be real careful -- if you view more than 2 (or perhaps 3) trail info pieces, the trail ends and your full $50 1-year membership starts right away.. no backing out).

Their main useful content seems to be scanned pages of many hiking books. You can look at the list of books they have without signing up for membership. If more than 4 - 5 books seem useful, I guess it might be worth the membership..

I cancelled because I found useful info in other books they didnt have and through forums. But I am still tempted to sign up again as it seems like a useful first-stop. Not so many books focus on backpack trips though.. usually day trips or climbing.

I haven't been able to find a good hiking forum for the Mid-Atlantic. But there are a couple of good sites - midatlantichikes mentioned above and also http://www.hikingupward.com/.

In addition, Google books has a bunch of hiking books available. Most aren't totally complete due to copyright issues, but some are 95%+ complete. A couple of examples for the area:

Hiking Virginia: A Guide to Virginia's Greatest Hiking Adventures

http://books.google.com/books?id=VkKEooYDuToC&printsec=frontcover&dq=hiking+virginia&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Hiking West Virginia

http://books.google.com/books?id=KnuYklpT9zcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=hiking+virginia&cd=3#v=onepage&q&f=false

Hiking Maryland and Delaware: A Guide to the Greatest Hiking Adventures

http://books.google.com/books?id=cMPYZYeS_soC&printsec=frontcover&dq=hiking+maryland&cd=1#v=onepage&q&f=false

Yeah, certainly biased toward day trips (as most hiking books, even the 'backpacking' books, seem to be). But I have discovered a few trails through that site that I've done (Black Forest is one that comes to mind). A quick search lets me find trails of the distance in which I'm interested, which is helpful. There are about 5-6 longer distance trails that I'm looking at, that I never would have known about probably but for the site.

But it's certainly not the only resource I use! I get a decent amount of info on trails from a couple of backpacking meetup groups I belong to as well.

It would be great to compile one!

For the Pacific Northwest:

Washington (primarily Seattle area): nwhikers.net; wta.org (the second is not a forum but compiles trip reports and has a good guide for finding hikes)

Oregon (primarily Portland area, including SW WA): portlandhikers.org, which in addition to its forum has an excellent field guide, similar to that of wta.org.

One of the best uses of local forums, IMHO, is to find out about current conditions. With our Northwest winter refusing to go away (still snowing down to 2500' and our snowpack now close to normal after being way below normal until mid-March), a lot of folks planning to hike in June around here are going to be very disappointed unless it suddenly turns off really hot!

Googling can often help. That's how I found nwhikers.net, which led me to portlandhikers.org a couple of weeks after the latter started up.

Edited by hikinggranny on 05/24/2010 17:37:34 MDT.

Another resource is LocalHikes.com - It's primarily day hikes but there are some backpacking trips listed.

I'll put in a plug for my own.
http://santabarbarahikes.com