The current Hike Trustees incentive program and website, including logging of hikes, badges and prizes, sunsetted on January 1, 2024.
What is the Hike Trustees challenge?
With more than 100 places and hundreds of miles of trails to explore across the state, Hike Trustees is a challenge to you to get hiking and see just how much you can explore. When the challenge is active, you visit our properties, log your hiking miles, and earn prizes upon reaching certain milestones.
What will be changing in 2024?
The Hike Trustees current incentive program and website, including logging of hikes, badges and monthly prizes, sunsetted on January 1, 2024.
Why is the Hike Trustees challenge changing?
In order to allow our team the capacity and resources to make important improvements to this program—and to collect feedback from you and think about how we can build a more inclusive community—we will be sunsetting the hiketrustees.org website and all our badge incentives and prizes.
Will the Facebook group stay open?
Yes! The Trustees Hikers Facebook group is a vibrant community for hikers to connect and share their experience of hiking Trustees properties. We encourage the group to continue and will be posting quarterly Hike Trustees meet-up information, focus group sign-ups for participants to help us reimagine the program, and many other opportunities to get outdoors and stay active in the community.
When will the Hike Trustees challenge return?
Our hope is that Hike Trustees will evolve and adapt to the changing needs of our community and better align with our diversity, equity and inclusion goals as an organization. As we look to re-imagine what’s possible, Hike Trustees may look different, or we may define a challenge program differently. We look forward to communicating updates as they’re available.
Why can’t you just run the challenge without the prizes?
We are in the midst of a large internal technological and data restructuring. This restructure would also affect the Hike Trustees website and the attached automations that are connected with the website. Flipping the website over to record 2024 hikes also takes considerable time and resources.
To optimize resources and capacity, we’re prioritizing our time and resources to making improvements to our technical infrastructure and re-imagining Hike Trustees.
This year we are encouraging hikers to still hike and track their properties with this downloadable map.
How will you keep in touch with hikers?
We will be sending out a quarterly email, scheduling quarterly group hikes, and organizing focus groups. Keep an eye on your inbox and on the Trustees Hikers Facebook group for ways to stay active, stay involved, and meet new hikers throughout the year!
How do I sign up for meet up and focus group hikes? These hikes will be promoted on the Hike Trustees Facebook group as well as in the quarterly newsletter, which you can sign up for here. You can sign up for focus group hikes specifically here.
What will happen to my leaderboard challenge data?
After January 31, 2024, your leaderboard challenge data will no longer be available. If you have been logging your miles and want to preserve a record of your hikes, please go to your individual hiker profile page on hiketrustees.org before January 31 to copy and save or print your data.
When and where will Hike Trustees meet-ups happen?
We are planning on hosting quarterly group hikes at Trustees special places around the state. These events will be announced via email and on the Trustees Hikers Facebook group.
Do I have to pay for Hike Trustees meet up hikes?
No, all Hike Trustees meet up hikes will be free and open to the public.
Will there be a new hiking app when you reimagine the Hike Challenge?
Unfortunately, this is not something that our team has capacity to launch at this time, but we’ll be leveraging your feedback to help us make decisions around the best technological solutions for supporting and engaging our community.
Are there other tools you recommend using to track hike in the interim?
Yes, you absolutely can! Using this downloadable map, you can keep track of all the properties that you have visited. We also recommend using AllTrails, Trailforks or Strava on your phone to track your hikes and view trail maps in real time.