Hiking for Hokies: the road less traveled

Almost everyone in their lifetime has gone hiking at least once. Some people enjoy it, and others hate it. Here in Blacksburg, Virginia Tech is situated in the New River Valley, surrounded by gorgeous scenery and mountains. Due to the immense hiking opportunities around campus, almost every student has hiked the Cascades, McAfee Knob and/or Dragon’s Tooth. After seeing students hike only one to three locations around Blacksburg, I decided to try to expand the hiking domain for Hokies.

During the summer after freshman year and going into my sophomore year as a Computer Science major, I thought it would be fun and challenging to implement all the locations I visited into a hiking website for students. Coming into freshman year, I would have never predicted that I would end the year exploring 21 locations around Blacksburg. I didn’t even bring a car to school, but I somehow managed to visit a plethora of places. After two summer months of absorbing HTML, figuring out the code and learning website configuration from my good friend Jay Park, I finally created and published my hiking website that includes the places I visited freshman year, and I am adding more locations as I continue to explore around Virginia Tech.  

To be frank, I am still in astonishment that I ended the year visiting 21 places. Thankfully, Virginia Tech students always desire adventure and good times. Almost every trip I have wanted to go on, students are willing to give rides to gain memories and experiences. It’s incredible how people from different backgrounds can bond through the outdoors. If you ask a random student to go hiking to a mind-blowing place, the random student would usually say yes to an experience and location like that. Even if someone goes hiking with someone they would have never talked to, the experience that those two people go through is something they can bond over and share about. By finding incredible places and asking random students to take a cool trip, this is how I got to hike the surplus of places near Blacksburg.

For me, spending time in the outdoors is an interesting scenario. Trips that are tiring and awful in the moment are my favorite trips. The ones that make me say, “This honestly sucks,” but after the trip, you remember the trip as a crazy but worthwhile journey. The hikes that make you sweat and work towards a view are the ones you’ll remember compared to a simple hike. As a kid, my parents would take me hiking to the Blue Ridge Mountains. At that time, I thought hiking was horrible because you would get dirty and tired for a somewhat decent view. However, as I got older, I understood that some activities and goals are more satisfying to complete when you put time, sweat, energy and effort into it. Eventually, I turned my idea of hiking from negative to positive outlooks. It feels absolutely incredible to finish a ten-mile hike to the view you’ve been working for, and that’s a feeling you will never get used to.

After all the grand experiences and memories I had with novel and unique individuals, I thought that creating a hiking website would help students gain notable memories for their college episode. Considering I visited many places here at Virginia Tech, I thought it would be appropriate as a Computer Science major to utilize both my hiking passion and coding experience on a project that other students can use. Even if my website isn’t used often, I hope there are a few individuals who gain good experiences from my website. The outdoors has helped me meet amazing people, and I wanted to share that potential bonding and experience with others to enhance their time here at Virginia Tech.