A note from William
Hey, I'm William.
I started Hikezilla in 2020 as a hiking group, organising walks around Sydney every weekend. It was fairly straightforward stuff: easy suburban walks, easy trails, mostly an excuse to get outside and meet people who wanted to do the same during COVID.
Then I got hooked.
The funny thing is, I didn't grow up doing any of this. I spent my early childhood in Kuala Lumpur, where weekends meant shopping malls, not skiing or camping with the family. I found the outdoors much later. Which is kind of the point: it doesn't matter where you come from or what you look like. The outdoors belongs to all of us.
It's done a lot for me. It got me through some emotionally tough times, and it's taken me around the world. I've spent months driving around New Zealand alone in a campervan, doing solo alpine missions and surviving on an unreasonable amount of tuna and noodles. I've road-tripped through Australia's national parks, spent last New Year's soloing the Western Arthurs, explored mountains across Europe and Asia, and run ridiculously fun races through places like Corsica.
But the summits aren't really the important bit. The outdoors gave me friendships and a way of looking at life I probably wouldn't have found otherwise. Running Hikezilla changed me too. I used to be impatient, a bit self-centred, and protective of my time and my gear. Then you spend a few years waiting at the bottom of a hill for the last person in the group, lending your gear to people you've just met, and detouring across Sydney to pick someone up, and it wears that out of you. Mostly.
Then Monday comes around.
During the week I work in tech, mostly in solutions, product and data. I've spent a lot of time in startup and tech communities, where people build things together: open-source projects, hackathons that turn ideas into something real, shared workspaces, mentoring, job boards. Tech has some genuinely great habits.
For a long time, those were two completely separate halves of my life. Four or five days in front of a screen, then off into the bush for the weekend. A few weeks somewhere wild, then back to the office or a tech conference.
So I started wondering: what if I brought the best bits of a tech community into an outdoor one?
Job board, Volunteering board, Events board, Open Source Project Board, Networking board, Outdoor datasets & API.
The outdoor community is full of people who know things. Bushwalkers with decades of experience from before GPS watches existed. Runners, photographers, volunteers, data nerds.
Everyone knows something.
Everyone has something to contribute.
For years I thought giving back meant organising another hike, and I loved doing it. But one person can only do so much. I can only run so many hikes, answer so many questions and lend out so much gear.
Over the next year I'll be spending more time away from Australia and New Zealand. That's part of why Hikezilla became a platform instead of just my weekend hiking group, but it's not the whole reason.
The real goal is for Hikezilla to run without me.
Events I'm not at.
Projects I didn't start.
Strangers helping strangers.
Maybe one day someone in New York takes the idea and starts their own.
If that happens, it worked.
So instead of asking how I can help more people get outside, I started asking how Hikezilla can help people help each other get outside.
I'm putting what I've got into it: my knowledge, my skills, my gear and my time.
The idea is to make it easier for everyone else to put in whatever they've got too.
Everyone below has helped me at some point, usually without knowing it.
So this is for them.
To the explorers
To the strangers on the trail who handed me water on a ridiculously hot day, shared their dinner because they'd packed too much, and explained the constellations under the stars.
Keep exploring.
Go somewhere new, take on the challenge, sign up for that ultra, climb the summit that's been on your bucket list for three years. Sleep outside.
Borrow my gear if that's what gets you there.
Adventure is still the core of Hikezilla.
To the builders
Keep building.
I check Mountain-Forecast before every trip, religiously, and someone had to build that.
The same goes for the mapping tools, datasets and stargazing apps we all take for granted.
I'd love to see more good open-source ones, which is why Hikezilla has outdoor datasets, community projects and workspace tools.
If you've got an idea that could be useful outdoors, we'd love to help.
And don't let the cost of a software subscription stop you.
Use ours.
To the creators
I've followed and chatted with a lot of you on Instagram without ever meeting in person.
Your content is fun and engaging, and it's a big part of what makes the outdoors feel like a community.
You don't need 50,000 followers.
If you've got something worth sharing, that's enough.
And if you need a camera, we've got gear you can borrow.
To the volunteers
Thank you. Seriously.
You're one of the most underrated parts of any community, outdoors or otherwise.
Races don't happen without you.
Trail markers don't put themselves up.
Communities don't run themselves.
Parkrun, trail races, coastal clean-ups, SES, conservation work.
One of you fed a completely cooked version of me noodles at 4am at a checkpoint in the middle of nowhere.
Another put a medal around my neck that meant more than you'll ever know.
Your contribution counts here, and I'd love to give something back to you.
To the leaders
Thank you for taking other people with you.
For being patient all those years ago.
For teaching me to self-arrest with an ice axe.
For building communities and writing the guides people rely on.
To this day, I still rely on plenty of off-track notes.
That's how outdoor communities keep going.
Good leaders make more leaders.
Somebody did that for me.
“Would this be suitable for a beginner?”
“Where can I camp?”
“What does this forecast mean?”
“Which route would you start with?”
To the helpers
To everyone who's answered a stranger's question on Reddit, a forum or a Facebook group: you're part of this too.
A lot of what I knew when I started came from people like you.
Which trail, what gear, where to camp, what tomorrow's forecast means.
It might have taken you two minutes, but you knew something I didn't and you took the time to share it.
You probably don't remember.
I do.
To everyone else
Not every contribution needs to be big.
Maybe you cheered from the sidelines of a race.
Maybe you gave a hitchhiker a lift from a trailhead back to civilisation.
(Thanks, by the way.)
Maybe you're a mate's emergency contact, waiting for the "I'm back" message.
Maybe you just gave someone kudos on Strava.
None of it needs points or recognition.
Maybe you just made someone's day a little better.
That counts too.
You and I may never meet.
That's completely fine.
I still built this for you.
Get outside.
Do something ridiculous.
Care for the bush.
Learn something, share something, help someone.
And maybe one day, somebody you helped will do the same for someone else.
That's the whole idea.
— William
