Alltrails
When a popular hiking app wants to grow, you hand the mic to your users.
Script for video
VO: Why do I love the outdoors?
The outdoors feels like home– but home in a way that is broader and harder to define.
My memories of being outdoors, whether it be camping with my family as a child, exploring national parks, or backpacking with my friends in college, all have peculiar qualities that they share: the smells, wet earth after a heavy rainstorm campfire smoke, pine trees, pungent mosquito spray.
Then there’s the way the light bends across the landscape during certain parts of the day, wild animals that seem to magically appear out of nowhere, as surprised to see you… as you are to see them.
Exploring the outdoors takes me out of my familiar surroundings, out of my comfortable patterns of thinking.
You become aware of this vast network of life that sustains itself, regardless of what humans are building or destroying, sometimes just a few miles away.
Still, when I venture into the outdoors for a hike, I never feel like I’m escaping my problems or preoccupations, I’m just gaining a new perspective. Things that seemed challenging become simple and comprehensible.
You could even say the journey of hiking up a mountain mirrors many of our own experiences in life.
We have to struggle, to taste adversity, in order to truly achieve something worthwhile— in this case, a beautiful vista and a healthy sense of accomplishment.
Though the journey is arduous at times, and the temptation to quit may arise within us, we continue.
We march upward and onward.
The outdoors then, is something of a laboratory for personal growth, a cherished crucible where we see just how strong our willpower is, where we discover who we are when we come up against brute obstacles within our path and within our own minds.
Sure,I can explain all I want about why I love nature. But what would nature say about me? What would it say about all of us?
In this age, one where we pillage its treasures and treat it more like a wastebasket instead of a dwelling place, we should ponder if nature would love us back.
Would our world look different if everyone knew the smells, or what it feels like to be exhausted and awestruck at the end of a long hike?
I believe so.