Thank you to all my followers and WTR members who have tolerated my DIY mentality and the associated problems on this website.

With the big ride coming up next month, I finally “bit the bullet,” so to speak, and hired a company to get this website in order. I just don’t have the know-how or mental capacity to keep this thing up and running. Andrew Goodwin, of Fifth Mission Marketing, Provo, Utah, has taken on the re-vamp project. Within a few days I expect this website to be looking great and humming right along.

Some of the features we hope to have available and working on the site are the following:

• A blog site, not only for my blog, but for anyone who regularly does trail rides and/or pack trips in the western United States, and wishes to blog about it. That includes outfitters, guides, and just plain old people like myself, who just love to do it.
• A gallery for members to post favorite photos of their trail riding and packing adventures, viewable by the public, or set to private at the discretion of the member.
• Forums for discussing and archiving detailed information about the trails we ride (facebook is great for one-liners and posting photos, but lousy for real discussion and making the information retrievable).
• Blog posts, comments on blog posts, gallery photos, and forum posts may be shared on other social media, such as facebook and twitter.
• An embedded link to a live map that will show in real-time the where Dad and I are on our Mexico-to-Canada pack trip. We hope to be able to do the same for other members and their trips.
• Future ability to add advertisement and sales on the page, for outfitters, suppliers, and other members who have goods/services to offer.
• The future ability for members to schedule and pay outfitters and guides who advertise on WTR.

I’m pretty excited about all this, particularly with regard to my blog followers and the members being able to follow our trip in real time on the map. The ride was the reason behind all this effort in the first place. The rest is simply icing on the cake.

My hope is, and always has been, that WTR will eventually become a site where people can come to find up-to-date and detailed information about places to ride and camp with horses in the western United States. My particular focus has been to document the little-known trails on BLM and USFS land, that are only know to the locals in the immediate vicinity. Many of these trails have existed for a century or more, but are quickly becoming impassable and disappearing, due to lack of use. Who knows whether the website will ever take hold and go, but it won’t die for lack of effort. I hope this ride Dad and I are taking will encourage others to join in and help keep our back country trails open and our rights to ride them secure.

Thanks again for all who have followed along. By this time next week, I hope the everything is back in order and working. It may look a little different, but I’ll still be “the man behind the curtain”.