The best place to start this story is in the middle, when Paul and I released the first version of our app, “Guthook’s Pacific Crest Trail Guide.” That’s “Guthook’s” with a possessive apostrophe, indicating I (Guthook being my trail name) had created a guide to the Pacific Crest Trail. But Paul and I worked equally on the app, so it could just as easily have been “Tangent’s Pacific Crest Trail Guide,” (Tangent being Paul’s trail name). At the time, though, I had a 5 year-old blog called “Guthook Hikes!”, so we decided to boost the app with my name.

That was seven years ago, though, and the name of the app has changed a few times. For a while, we had variations of “Guthook’s Guide” to various trails. Within a few years, so many hikers referred to “Guthook” as a daily part of their hike that I almost wished we had chosen a different name. My friends had been calling me Guthook since years before I hiked the Appalachian Trail, so when I heard hikers say things like “I look at Guthook all the time,” or “I checked out Guthook in my tent this morning,” I started to feel a tiny bit uncomfortable. But the ship had sailed by that point. No turning back now!

Eventually, when we combined our various trail apps into one, we decided on a simpler name. “Guthook Guides” is the official name, although if people use some variation of “Guthook,” it’s not hard to understand what they’re referring to. I find it amusing to continually hear people referring to “Guthooks,” which I guess is a plural of “Guthook,” though there’s only one of me.

And what exactly does “Guthook” mean? We get that question from time to time, too, although much less than you’d think. As I mentioned above, I’ve had the trail name since well before I began thru-hiking. The story isn’t very exciting – on a spring break trip with my college’s outing club, one of the club’s leaders decided that the freshmen needed intimidating names for our future forays into the wilderness. We were at a hunting and fishing store at the time, and the aisle stocked with various sharp tools provided a great array of names for us. Guthook, Bonesaw, and Meat Cleaver are a few that stuck.

You might wonder if it’s proper to use a name from before a thru-hike as your trail name, since you’re supposed to get your trail name on the trail. I’ve always said that anyone who claims there are rules about trail names is mistaken, though. Your trail name is whatever sticks, and what stuck for me was “Guthook.” What has stuck for the app that we’ve created is also “Guthook.”