Steven over at My Life Outdoors asked his readers to nominate the top outdoor blogs, which was a tidy coincidence: Today I wrapped up a quick-and-dirty analysis of more than 300 sites on my Twitter list of hiking and camping blogs.
My Top 10 were excellent, but it’s never a surprise to find 10 great examples of anything. I was more amazed at how many great blogs I had to choose from. Back when I started Two-Heel Drive there might’ve been a half-dozen really good hiking/camping blogs. Today there are well over 100. I pared that list down to about 50, then slashed one more time to get the Top 10:
- Hiking in Finland — Hendrik Morkel is the best hiking blogger we’ve got at the moment. He’s smart, opinionated, occasionally infuriating and straight-up crazy about sharing tips for lightweight backpacking.
- Florida Hikes — I guess when you’ve got no mountains and alligators instead of bears, you have to try harder.
- Trail Cooking & the Outdoors — Every backpacker who’s had to scrape the encrusted oatmeal out of their titanium pots is thankful for the advent of Freezerbag Cooking.
- Dirty Gourmet — I checked this site out in depth for the first time. Clean design, great writing and authoritative coverage make Dirty Gourmet a winner.
- Daily Hiker — Still a great mix of news, commentary and gear here.
- Gear Talk with Jason Klass — We should all just travel to Colorado and have Jason teach us how he makes such cool videos.
- Section Hiker — Always a solid performer with a strong mix of tips, gear and trip reports.
- Smoky Mountain Hiking Blog — Evidence that it’s possible to have a site devoted to hiking news.
- The Gearcaster — Another site proving that video brings a whole new dimension to gear blogging.
- Cold Splinters — Cold Splinters’ capacity to tap into totally cool stuff is unmatched.
Methodology: To be great, a blog needs to answer four questions:
- Does it have great content — writing, multimedia, editorial decisions?
- Is it a resource of something greater than the blogger’s opinions?
- Does it have a well-defined niche and stay on topic?
- Is it easy to use with clean design and intuitive navigation?
Once I had my top 100, I rated each from one to three on each of those four questions. But that only got me down to the final 50, so I simply forced myself to choose 10 that I liked better than the rest, then I ranked those accordingly.
Using different standards would produce an entirely different list, no doubt. And forcing myself to choose 10 willfully omits at least a couple dozen that might be on somebody else’s 10 Best list. More of my favorites from the top 50:
- LA Hiker — A video site illustrating the embarrassment of riches in southern California hiking coverage.
- Brian’s Backpacking Blog — It pained me to leave Brian’s site out of the Top 10. He posts a wealth of tips that makes his site a must-read.
- Hiking Lady — This site seems much improved of late; my first impression was that it was mainly an affiliate site but over time I’ve come to respect it a lot more.
Here’s a look at the top 100-plus blogs I was working from:
What a coincidence…and what a feat! Looks like some good stuff here…The are some blogs in your top 100 that I have never heard of but look forward to exploring. I hope to create a list next week where people can vote on their favorite outdoor blogs. It will be interesting to see how that vote compares to your list.
Many, many thanks Tom – I’m honoured! Hopefully I will be able to keep up with the pressure now =)
Hendrik: you went from not even being on my list of personal favorites I posted awhile back to top of the list within a couple months.
That’s evidence of how much I’ve been impressed with what you’ve been up to lately.
No love for the Jolly Green Giant (www.jolly-green-giant.blogspot.com)? He’s hysterical, cutting edge on gear,gets around 10,000 hits per month, and doesn’t get lost in the hype of advertisers or offering narratives about hiking which are normally pretty boring to those who weren’t there.
So close, but not quite top-ten worthy 🙂 I’m glad to hear that it pained you to omit me from the list, but in all seriousness the top 10 you’ve chosen are all tremendous well written blogs and ones I read on a regular basis myself.
To even be mentioned in the same blog post with them is quite an honor itself. Great list and nice way to pay it forward with our outdoor community. Thanks Tom!
Brian: The environment really has changed dramatically over the past few years.
I winnowed the list down to around 100-plus but the Top 100 really needs to have about 150 in it.
Racking my brain for ways to tap into all that.
Sherry: That’s a great s suggestion. I had to start somewhere to boil down the list so I went with people who had active Twitter feeds. This leaves out everybody not on Twitter — a tiny minority these days, but one that appears to include Jolly Green Giant.
Here’s a live link to Jolly Green Giant — http://www.jolly-green-giant.blogspot.com/ … this is a well-written blog for ultra-lightweight backpackers that has linked to me for ages — I added him to the Top 100 (which is going to be 150 before long, I suspect.)
I agree that the hiking-trip narratives can be tiresome, but then again, dwelling on gear gets old as well.
And after you’ve hiked and blogged for five years it’s hard to find more fresh ways to say “wow, walking in the woods is a really great thing to do.”
So Top 10 lists and their ilk break up the monotony. But they aren’t exactly scientific — especially given the fact that they’re true only at the time of publication.
….aaaaand my Google Reader just tripled in size.
Thanks. 🙂
I’m honoured to make your Top 100! Thanks  a lot!
I’m going to up my game next year…
Great stuff! Thanks for including the top 100 blogs as well. Check out my blog (may be in your top one thousand…). http://www.mountainmanami.blogspot.com
Game on! Greene Adventures
Tom,
Great assignment! Great choices! I’m proud just to be in the top 100!
But, dang, Tom, you know what? You modestly left yourself off the list!
well the point of this exercise was to point people to other interesting blogs … pointing to myself would be kinda redundant in that context, given that they’re already here.
Wow man. What a great list! That must have been a ton of work. Thanks for pulling it together!
Thanks! Â This is an awesome list and we are honored to be on it! Â Checking them out now…
Thanks for the thumbs up! We have bears too – saw two last week – but the gators and snakes are more impressive 🙂 happy trails from Florida
Hey! How have you managed to procure this list? This sure took you quite some time.
 Some very good names, must say. And very much impressive who managed to be in your list.
If you want to break camping down to its lowest common denominator, which of course is dirt, check out my blog http://www.campingfunwithcarl.blogspot.com/
I hope you like it.
Hey guys, check out http://www.outwithmygear.com for campground reviews (within US for now), gear reviews, state and national parks, and other adventures 🙂
Thanks and keep on camping!
🙂
I’m surprised to not see http://www.calihike.blogspot.com on this list. Hiking 1000 Trails in 1000 Days and very informative…