Some of you will be asking this question and others will recognize that we have returned after being absent from the web for a couple of years.

FootTrails began in 2000 as a way for my cousin Jimmy and I to document all of our hiking and camping trips. At the time, when we'd decide to take a weekend and go hiking, we would begin to search the Internet for new trails in our area. Often what we would find would be a small blurb here or there about a trail, what scenery there was and often inaccurate directions. We would also consult several books at the bookstore and make a determination on where we wanted to go. 

After just a few trips, we thought we could do it better. As a couple of recently graduated computer geeks, we put our heads together and FootTrails was born!. Our goal was to document our trips as accurately as possible, describe the highlights, take pictures and then publish the report our new website.

A great example was on one of our very first trips to Gregory Bald in Tennessee. We had read online that this was a spectacular hike and had awesome views from over 4500 feet. What we didn't find online was that the first campsite we came to was quite disappointing and we should have hiked a little bit furthur to a much better site that was a lot closer to a water source. Since we were both quite out of shape and I had just come off a second knee surgery, it would also have been helpful to know that going in from the Twentymile Trail side and taking on Long Hungry Ridge was quite a task!

The site grew fast! After 4 years, we had a great forum and quite a collection of articles, gear reviews, trip reports, maps available for download and member submitted photos. 

Unfortunately, somewhere in 2005, we had a crash. Yeah, the kind of crash you never like. The kind where you didn't have a back-up. FootTrails was gone. For quite some time, many loyal users kept seeing error messages when they went to "foottrails.com".

The good news is that we're back! We've got to start all over again but we hope we can once again become a great on-line source for useful information about the great outdoors.

Special thanks to Jimmy who put in so much work on the original site and to the other 1000+ members that contributed so much in the past. We hope to see you all back here! 

Happy Hiking,

Chris Cobb