Who gets to know? - #51

The ins and outs and ups and bottoms of geotagging.

Next week marks the one year anniversary of this newsletter. Holy pine cones. This means I’ll be cooking up a reader survey for y’all. This has been the best project I’ve ever worked on, and in no small part because y’all make it so fun. Given that, I’d like to make this newsletter better for you — so if you’ve been dying for me to do something different, more, better, less, etc., I’ll be asking you all about it next week.

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A year ago, when I arrived in this town, I met the mayor at a town party. The town threw the gathering partly to welcome us, and partly to say goodbye to the delightful curmudgeon who had built our home and had lived in this tiny town for decades.

Some of you may recall this interaction. 

“I hear you have a little bit of an Instagram following,” the mayor said.

“I mean, a small one.” At the time, I had around 5,000 followers on Instagram.

“Well I just wanted to let you know, if you ever geotag this town, I’ll drag you out of it.”

Geotagging, if you’re unfamiliar, is assigning a location to a social post. By doing so, people who see your post can click on the location and see exactly where it is. There are a few reasons people do this: 1) it’s a box to fill out and we are sheep, 2) bragging, 3) utilizing another feature that allows their content to be discovered (because once you click on a location, you see all the posts tagged into that location), and 4) sharing information you think others will benefit from. 

Notably, you do not have to be anywhere near the location you’re tagging in order to tag it. I could post a photo of huckleberry jam, say something like “missing home” and geotag Idaho, even though I’m not there. You can also make up locations. You can geotag things as Paradise, Hell, Your Mom’s House, whatever. If I geotag, I typically just tag ‘Colorado’ because I do want people to discover my content who might be interested in it, but I do not want them knowing where I live. The crux of most tagging is this: here’s exactly where I am doing the thing I am doing. 

But like FourSquare or Yelp or articles titled “5 Amazing Mountain Towns You’ve Never Heard Of”, any time someone shares a cool place, more people go to those places. And the more people that go to those places, the more those places typically evolve. In the best case scenario, they might become more accessible, more likely to be saved, more diverse, more successful. In other cases, they might become more crowded, louder, harder to get into, dirtier, cleaner!, more expensive, etc. Whatever it is, when more people go to a place over time, it changes, and we know how much people love when something they like changes. Not much. 

Geotagging can apply to states, mountain ranges, specific coordinates in the backcountry, but it also applies to businesses. You can geotag LAX. You can geotag your local grocery, your old high school, parks, clothing stores, movie theaters, etc. There’s a restaurant in the Colorado town of Telluride called There. I’ve been to There. It’s good. Earlier this summer, There offered their patrons a trade: instead of geotagging remote and “at-risk” remote places in our wilderness (which we’ll get to), geotag your beautiful nature photos as being “at There”. As There said, if you did that, you would not only help reduce the number of people disrupting the wilderness, but There would give you a free drink for doing so.

But all well-intentioned solutions offer their own problems, as illustrated by the entire concept of the television show The Good Place. Who, after all, does get to disturb the wilderness? 

There are valid reasons to exclude a location on a social post, like safety. I’ll spare you from reading some of the things people have said to me on the internet, but rest assured, I do not want those people knowing where I hang out. But if the reason you’re not geotagging is because you don’t want anyone else to know about it, that can be considered gatekeeping. 

If you’re like me, you grew up understanding the principles of Leave No Trace. Maybe you know how to read the wind, or understand why you need to be off big mountains around lunchtime. Maybe you know someone with a peak-bagging list. Maybe you are that someone! But growing up like that doesn’t mean we get a free pass to the park while people who grew up differently shouldn’t be allowed in. Danielle Williams, founder of DiversifyOutdoors.com, wrote an article in 2019 that talks about how the anti-geotag movement reeks of socioeconomic privilege and racist undertones. 

By not geotagging a secret place in the wilderness, you are keeping that information from people who don’t have the same privilege to know about it as you do. The counter argument many people make is that some things in the wilderness need to be earned through research. I’m not sure this matters. I mean I can do all the research I want on climbing Everest — I’m still not going to be capable of climbing it if I flew in next week. (And the counter counter argument is why does everything have to be about social media, god lift me from this trash heap.)

The anti-geotag movement comes from a number of different motives: I want my special little trail all to myself (bad), too many people visiting one place with a delicate ecosystem at once is not good for the environment (true), I don’t want anyone who experiences the wilderness differently from me to be there (bad, though I really do hate hearing loud music in the woods), and these people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing and they’re going to get hurt. That last one can be true. 

There are a number of trails and mountains here I wouldn’t want a novice attempting to explore because if they get hurt, do they know what to do? Did they bring a Spot? Do they have enough food and water to survive till someone shows up? Do you like taking selfies in front of cliffs? The pandemic brought many people into the wilderness for the first time, and while an appreciation for nature is necessary to save our planet, it also meant a lot of people showed up unprepared — and local Search & Rescue groups bore the burden. But is me tagging a location six hours from a major airport really going to encourage someone who’s never climbed a mountain to go climb that one? 

I mean, yes. People do this. People are nuts.

There’s no denying that humans ruin things. Humans trample wildflowers and litter and blare music in the wilderness. Humans go off piste, take shortcuts through trail restoration zones, and leave their toilet paper in heaps. Even in this dreamy paradise of 180 very accountable people, I have yet to go to our trash building and see every cardboard box actually broken down, every aluminum can actually crushed. People are busy and when people are busy, they can be thoughtless, selfish, and many other base qualities. Hell, people are like this even when they’re not busy. My own husband has had to repeatedly explain to me just how clean a plastic container has to be before I recycle it. (It has to be VERY CLEAN.) 

There’s also no denying that sometimes, humans don’t think things through. People show up to climb mountains in flip flops. They go backpacking without ever testing their camp stove. They try to take pictures with bears, buffalo, and be-still-my-beating-heart — mountain lion cubs. 

There are no Forest Service trails here. Many moons ago, there were a few, but the signs have long since fallen — either in time or under the punishing weight of repeated avalanches. The town is, really, a dead-end town. There are a handful of public parking spaces. You are not allowed to park on the road. All the roads are dirt. The dirt is laced with poison from years of mining. When cars drive on that dirt over 10mph, they kick up significant dirt, which we breathe all summer and fall. So when the Forest Service proposed putting a parking lot at the end of one of the dead-end dirt streets here to expand trails into the wilderness, the town said no. 

So who gets to come here? Only the people who could afford a house here? Even if you had the money, very few houses ever come up for sale here. After all, there’s only about 70 of them. This town manages its own water, its own trash, its own roads. Short-term rentals are banned. The terrain can be, to someone unfamiliar, dangerous. And when someone is hurt here, it’s a local who runs the heli-rescue. Search and Rescue in the American West is almost always a volunteer effort. Unlike Switzerland and Canada who have professional teams dedicated to saving lost tourists and rescuing injured alpinists, America has whoever’s willing to leave work to head into the backcountry, often with gear they bought themselves. It’s why we leave our radios on in the winter: just in case.  

Let’s return to the original sentiment: by not geotagging, you are keeping that information from people who don’t have the same privilege to know about it as you do. 

But which people? There’s a house near ours that’s pending final sale. It’s in the avalanche path, has 3 bedrooms, and 1 garage spot. It’s selling for $1.8 million. In a town that can see 300” of annual snowfall, on a dirt road that has avalanches, where you can’t short-term rental — that house is selling for almost 2 million dollars. When the mayor asked me to not geotag this town, it wasn’t to keep people with less privilege out — it was to keep people with more privilege out. 

In the neighboring town, the one with actual amenities and businesses, the median listing home price in July 2022 was $3.8 million. Our town has been one of the last vestiges of affordable housing in the area, partially because of how challenging it can be to live here, and Ben didn’t find it because someone tagged it — he found it by looking at maps. Paper maps. The big fear here is that as “rugged” becomes more and more cool, the wealth of the ski area will bleed over here leading to people buying homes they’re only in for a handful of weeks out of the year. 

It’s not like people don’t geotag here, either. But the ones who do are often driving their overlander over the pass — because it’s not home to them, it’s an adventure. They’re excited to show their friends, for any myriad reasons. Or they’re at a nearby lake — a lake that you can see from the main road, the only road that goes by here. And tagging a picture with a location can be the thing that takes it from the audience being like “cool” to “COOL.” Taking a picture of your feet in the sand and tagging it Ibiza is going to hit real different than tagging it Mentor Headlands, Cleveland Ohio. And no matter where you tag, when you click that tag to see other photos, what you’ll mostly see isn’t remote mountain lakes or hidden jungle hot springs, but butts. 

I clicked on the locations for the last three places I lived, and here were the top posts. 

Honestly, great butts.

Earlier this week, I posted an Instagram poll asking people what their opinion on geotagging was. Most people voted for “stop geotagging shit” but a good 40% voted for “wut” telling me that this geotagging argument was like, deep outdoors culture. Most people are out there just living their lives and I’m over here writing this essay. But I think that’s because the reality of geotagging isn’t gatekeeping or access-sharing, it is quite literally butts.

This is where geotagging is lost on me. Do I need to know where these butts are? Because the location is not what the photo is about. The photo is about the butt. All three of these people have amazing butts! But it’s not telling me anything about the place other than you can take your butt there. (My butt has, in fact, been to all these places, despite her presence going unphotographed.) So as much as we argue about whether or not it’s right to use geotags, most people using them are using them for, well, attention on the thing they want attention on.

And that’s how I use them. I write articles about wildlife, cabin living, backcountry skiing, etc., and I want people who are interested in those things to find those articles. Just not my house.

No matter where you photograph your butt, reality persists: the environment is in dire straits, our park systems are woefully underfunded, and just because something looks cool doesn’t mean it is. Plus, what’s the point of geotagging the wilderness when you can just get an AllTrails account and watch a hyperlapse video of the entire trail that some guy posted to YouTube eight years ago? 

Maybe just so someone looking for a good trail can instead, finally, see a really nice butt. 

I don’t mention this town by name because in the end, it’s not about this town. It’s about trying to live differently than I did before. I think of my happiness like a plant. From where I’m sitting in my house, I can see 19 plants. One of them is a succulent that came with us from California. In sat on our deck in the warm sun, and was the prettiest shade of deep red. It made the drive, found a new home on the bookcase in our new house, and then a month later, it turned a rich, forest green.

We just gaped at it. It seemed fine in Topanga! It grew! It did things! And then here, it just… it just became a totally different plant. Honestly, so did I.

I don’t geotag because it doesn’t matter. This soil isn’t right for everyone, but it is right for me. And if I post a photo of a hike and someone wants to know where it is, they can ask, and I will tell them. We don’t have to give everything to Instagram when what we’re really missing is giving things to each other.

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I am curious though: do you geotag? Why or why not? What are your rules and boundaries? Do you want people to know where your butt’s been?