PCT Trail Tracker

A lightweight personal trail tracker built with GitHub Pages.

This site combines live-ish activity data, maps, photos, and short updates into a single, mobile-friendly page that can be edited directly from a phone.

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What this site does

• Map & Progress

  • Displays the current trail track
  • Shows distance, elevation, time, averages, and progress
  • Data is generated from activity tracking (e.g. Strava export / sync workflow)

• Trail Updates

  • Simple text-based updates written in Markdown
  • Designed to be fast to edit from a phone while on trail

• Photos

  • Auto-synced from a Flickr album
  • No local image management needed

• Gear

  • Embedded gear list created with lighterpack.com
  • Always up to date without manual copying

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How it works

• The site is built with GitHub Pages (Jekyll)
• Styling and layout are optimized for mobile editing
• Activity data and tracks live in /data/
• Pages are simple Markdown files:
  • index.md – map & stats
  • updates.md – trail updates
  • photos.md – photo gallery
  • gear.md – gear overview

No CMS, no database, no backend server.

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Folder structure (simplified)

. ├── _layouts/ # Page layouts ├── assets/ # CSS and frontend assets ├── scripts/ # Map, stats, and data logic ├── data/ # Track and activity data ├── index.md # Map & statistics ├── updates.md # Trail updates ├── photos.md # Flickr photos ├── gear.md # Gear & Lighterpack ├── _config.yml # GitHub Pages config └── README.md

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Why this exists

This project is meant to be:

• simple
• robust
• editable from a phone
• independent of social platforms

It’s a personal trail log, not a social feed.

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License

Personal project.
Feel free to take inspiration, but this is not intended as a drop-in product.