The Dartmouth Outing Club is the largest collegiate outdoors club in the nation, running over 500 wilderness excursions per year, ranging from short day hikes to week-long backpacking trips in Peru. It also claims the title as the oldest, with a long history founded in 1911.

Yet it wasn't until this year when digital technology came into the picture to help with the club's operations and foster a stronger outdoors community at Dartmouth College.

Many excursions go out every week, and it's always been a headache tracking these expeditions. The whiteboards at the office in Robinson Hall was often overwhelmed with notes.

The other problem came from outside the Club's operations. Most students weren't aware of the plethora of opporutnities to get outdoors. Most trips are fully-funded and free for students, but many students aren't in the loop to know when to sign up.

Trailhead emerged with the sole mission of promoting outdoor culture at Dartmouth College. This involved increasing accessibility to opportunities, inspire students to find excursions that fulfills them, and help plan all underlying, busy logistics.

The first two aspects were spearheaded by a design-first mindset when creating Trailhead. We brainstormed ways to make outdoor trips dicoverable and fun. We built powerful search features to help students find what fits their interests and physical abilities.

The third aspect drove feature develpment to make trip maangement as seamless as possible for the tireless staff members of the Outing Club. These include birds-eye calendar views, trip forms, gear inventories, vehicle fleets, and membership lists.

Since Trailhead's launch last fall, we've helped over 1,600 students get outdoors on over 650 trips! If you're passionate aobut the outdoors at Dartmouth and technology, reach out to the active maintainer Ziray Hao. We greatly appreciate all the hands who helped bring Trailhead to fruition: Benedict Tedjokusumo, Regina Yan, Justin Luo, Dorothy Qu, Emma Rafkin, Morgan Sorbaro, Ashley Song, Sydney Friedland, and Grace Thompson.