[JimK]

Wow, time really flies! MCaver became the first member of this site on December 14, 2001. Here is a thread from 2004 with some info on how things got started: What brought you to NWHikers.net? This post was by MCaver:

I started at WTA's Trail Talk forum as well, right after I'd moved to the PNW in fall of 2000. When they shut Trail Talk down, MtnGoat quickly set up a new forum for us refugees at a place called Accessboards, and Scrooge rounded up as many of us as he could find and pointed us there. It was bad timing, though, since Accessboards went down for good not too long afterward, and with no notice beforehand. Since I'd been involved with websites for several years, I decided to donate space and to buy the domain name for our own site, hopefully turning a small band of refugees into our own community responsible for our own fate. Tom agreed, and volunteered to run and moderate it. Thus, NWHikers was born. We have our third anniversary on Dec 12, I believe.

A lot of folks have come and gone over the years but the forum keeps on going. Kudos to Tom for overseeing it all these years.
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Jump to page 3 for the 17th birthday post!

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Hiking Northwest

[Schenk]

Happy Birthday NWHikers!
Thank you Tom and Founders!

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Nature exists with a stark indifference to humans' situation.

[Foist]

Yes thanks Tom!  And thanks Jim, you were the one who tipped me off to this site when I was researching trips in spring of 2006.

[Riverside Laker]

Still on it since day 5 or so...

[Grannyhiker]

Happy birthday, NWHikers!   
                 

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May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view.--E.Abbey

[Backpacker Joe]

Merry Christmas, and yes thanks to Mac and Tom for all their hard work.
           

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"If destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die by suicide."

— Abraham Lincoln

[Pyrites]

Woo Hoo!

Thank you,

Tom et al.


And on the footer:

"...Our users have posted a total of 999033 articles..."

[wildernessed]

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Living in the Anthropocene

[mb]

wow, so many years of  !

[polarbear]

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...and a window that looks out on Corcovado...  Corcovado Hill

[cambajamba]

Great site, great community, great flame wars, great beta - who could ask for anything more? Thanks to everyone involved for all your hard work over the years.

[Tom]

I think our birthday is technically Dec 16 if you go by first post.  Looks like we manually converted posts in the early morning from a temporary service we used while setting up NWHikers, and the site went live later that morning.   Can't believe it's been 15 years.  Life goes by fast!  While activity is less than pre facebook days it's good to see a solid core of members who continue to make this forum an invaluable resource.  Thanks to all who have contributed over the years and made this site what it is.

[Damian]

     We owe part of this to Tom getting in trouble for causing problems back on the WTA site.  I think I got temporarily banned there too.  The good ol days. 

[puzzlr]

Not only is this site 15 years old and running successfully in the grand tradition of usenet boards, Tom has judicially added features that make it functionally better than all the whiz bang responsive parallax uselessness that is ruining the web these days. Content is key, and this site has content like no other. Congrats!

I joined in 2007 and have felt like a late comer the whole time. Now I have been here more than half the the lifetime of the site so I'll stop feeling that way. Thanks for the reminder.

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Mid Fork Rocks • flickr

[olderthanIusedtobe]