25th Anniversary of my website!

 

Twenty-five years ago (January of 1996) I began a website called Chuck's Backpacking Bonanza which documented with photos and information my 60+ backpacking adventures across the country. 

There were very few Internet gateways to such information back then (no Google yet either!) and my site became one of two go-to websites for such information. I regularly got emailed questions about where and how to backpack and I answered every question. For those who recall, uploading photos and webpages back then was slow and arduous and done by slow telephone modem. What takes mere seconds now took minutes back then and the resolution of the photos was poor.

That site was hosted by AOL for 13 years until they ceased hosting websites in October of 2008 with only weeks of warning time, so I hurriedly and laboriously moved everything over to Google's blogger.com site.

As the years progressed and technology improved, I added my biking, rafting, kayaking, canoeing, volunteer trail projects, wildlife photos, US scenic roads, and Road Scholar/Elderhostel adventures to the site and changed the name to Bike, Hike, and Paddle which now serves as the index for my Chuck's Adventures site. Together the two sites have had over 710,000 visits and contain over fifteen thousand photos. 

Then a decade ago, I began making videos of my adventures, and my YouTube channel has over 150 movies and over 535,000 views with 561 subscribers. It's rewarding to share my outdoor adventures with so many people and to answer myriads of questions they regularly pose to me. Enjoy my efforts!