Thank you Andrew and Jan at Fifth Mission Marketing, Provo, Utah, for getting westerntrailrider.com back up and running!

As many of you know, my website has been only partially functional for quite some time now. After several updates by Word Press, phpbb3, and Coppermine, the three programs pretty much stopped talking to each other. Additionally, the forum suffered a brute-force spam attack in December, after which I shut down the forum, comments, and other functions. I had to manually delete over 5,000 spam members and comments. After that I attempted to update the site and get if functioning properly again, but simply made matters worse. I ended up losing the ability to administer the forum at all and thought I had lost the content we had accumulated on there over the past two years.  I finally gave up and decided to hire a company to get things working again. I’m glad I did.

One day before I head south to begin the big Mexico-to-Canada pack trip, the westerntrailrider.com is finally back up and running. All the prior data has been restored, and everything is functioning.

We have added a new item on the menu. Anyone who would like to may click on the “Trail Map” button and see a real-time map of our progress on the first two legs of the trip. We’re still tweaking a couple of details, but this has me very excited.

So, if you are a long-time member who has been waiting patiently for me to get things fixed, thank you for your patience and please come back and participate in the forums. Post your favorite pictures of your trail rides on your own gallery album.  If you are a new member, or someone just looking, come join in the fun.

For those who regularly ride trails in the western US, who enjoy documenting their trail rides, please join us and start a blog under the Western Trail Rider banner. I’ll also provide you with a WTR email address for your blog.

My goal for Western Trail Rider is, and always has been, to make this website the place to come to for information on equine-use trails, particularly for horse and mule packing, in the western United States. While every state and national park has its own website, for the lesser known trails on public lands, there is very little documentation and information about them is hard to come by. Many of those trails are disappearing, due to lack of use. Many trails that have existed for more than a century are no longer passable for horses, many can no longer be found at all. This website is dedicated to preserving such trails for future generations. I invite everyone who feels the same to come, join in, and help.

Now, having gotten the website working again, and issued the above invitation, don’t forget that I will be on a 1,000 mile pack trip (the first two legs of our Mexico-to-Canada pack trip) for about the next couple months. I expect to be back to the real world around the end of June. I probably won’t be posting much on my blog for a while.

Then again, the big ride was the whole impetus behind Western Trail Rider in the first place.

Excellent!