Who writes Compass & Trails
Every page on this site is researched and written by one person. That is the whole explanation. There is no editorial team, no freelance pool, no agency, and no content supplier behind the byline.
The byline on article pages reads “the Compass & Trails editor” rather than a personal name because that is literally the situation, and it seemed worse to invent a staff roster than to describe a small site honestly. If you need to know who is accountable for a page, it is the same single person who answers fmj3419@gmail.com.
How pages are researched
Two kinds of sources sit behind almost every page.
Official public sources, for anything a rule can change. Permit systems, shuttle hours, road closures, seasonal gate openings, wildlife food-storage rules, and entrance fees come from the land manager — most often the National Park Service, sometimes a state park agency or a state department of transportation. Pages link to the specific official page rather than to a park’s home page, so a reader can check the exact rule instead of hunting for it.
Planning knowledge, for anything a reader has to decide. How long a climb actually takes at a tired pace. Where the parking lot fills and when. Which turnaround point makes a hard trail reasonable for a half day. Which of two scenic drives is worth the extra night. That part is not on an official page, and it is the reason the site exists at all.
Where the two disagree, the official source wins and the page says so. Where a number is a typical range rather than a surveyed measurement, the page labels it as a range instead of implying precision that does not exist.
How to read the numbers on a page
Distances, elevation figures, and hiking times on this site are planning ranges. They are not surveys and they are not averages of other people’s trip reports. Two hikers on the same trail will get different numbers, and the snow year changes what a route looks like in June. Use the figures to compare one trail against another and to size a day, then treat the official trail report as the last word.
Difficulty labels — Easy, Moderate, Hard, Expert — are this site’s editorial convention, not a national standard. Parks and guidebooks use the same words to mean different things. The difficulty guide explains what the labels mean here.
What this page does not claim
It is worth being explicit, because travel writing is full of claims that are hard to check:
- No professional guiding credential, certification, or license is claimed.
- No employment by, partnership with, or endorsement from the National Park Service, any park, any land manager, or any brand mentioned on the site.
- No medical, legal, or safety-professional advice. Nothing here is a substitute for a ranger, a doctor, or your own judgment on the day.
- No claim of having walked every route in person. Where a page rests mainly on official sources rather than first-hand experience, it points to those sources so you can weigh it yourself.
How corrections work
Trail closures, permit lotteries, and shuttle systems change faster than any static page. If something here is wrong or out of date, email fmj3419@gmail.com with the page address and what should change. Corrections that can be verified against an official source are made and the page’s update date changes. If a correction cannot be verified, the page says so rather than quietly adopting it.
Independence and advertising
This site does not accept sponsored posts, paid links, or paid destination placements, and no advertiser sees a page before it is published. Display advertising that appears on the site is served by Google and other third-party vendors; it is not sold or curated here, and it has no influence on which places are covered or how they are described. The editorial policy and the terms cover this in more detail.
Dates on pages
Every article page carries a “last updated” date next to the byline. The date changes when the page’s substance changes — a new permit rule, a corrected mileage, a route that has reopened — not when a page is merely reformatted. A page whose date is old is a page whose information has not needed to change, which is a different thing from a page nobody maintains.
Contact
Questions, corrections, and destination suggestions all go to fmj3419@gmail.com. See also the about page, the editorial policy, and the contact page.