What do you think you're hiding?
Either post your Strava map or don't post at all
Strava, the social media “for active people,” claims to provide community-powered motivation for more than 100 million users. Opening Strava summons a feed showing off how far and fast your friends biked, ran, and skied that day—usually not the app to open for an ego boost.
My home of Boulder has to include, if not most of the claimed userbase, some of the biggest power users of the platform. Boulderites LOVE Strava (and they’re all psychos—good luck getting any KOMs or Local Legends in Boulder). I hear it described as friends’ “preferred social media” or as a “dating app” regularly.
Living in ground zero of Strava culture, then, I feel qualified to make this declaration:
DON’T HIDE YOUR MAP ON STRAVA.
If you’re thinking about hiding your map, make the whole post private.
There are only two reasons to hide your activity map while still making a public post (provided that you don’t always hide your maps for privacy/safety reasons):
You were doing something you shouldn’t have been doing or were somewhere you aren’t allowed to be.
You’re trying to flex some cool secret spot to people that don’t know about it (or to signal to people who do know about it that YOU also know about it).
In the case of 1), I get it. I’ve skied an aspect that was aggressive for the day’s avalanche conditions too. I’ve gotten lost. I’ve had what should have been a quick and casual day ascending the Third Flatiron turn into an eight-hour epic. But hiding our mistakes doesn’t erase them, and owning them may even help someone else avoid them in the future. If you’re ashamed to post something because you “got away” with taking unreasonable risks, then maybe you shouldn’t have taken that risk. If you’re doing something illegal or trespassing… maybe don’t record GPS tracks your crime! Whether or not they’re the map is privatized, they’re still on Strava’s servers.
In the case of 2)…
Fuck you. Stop gatekeeping.
Let’s be wholly honest: the Strava project is about, above all else, vanity. Yes, it has maps that are useful in planning adventures. Sure, I’m confident that some people use its dashboard of statistics to inform some highly-scientific approach to training (couldn’t be me). But the overwhelming reason people use Strava is because of its social aspect—otherwise, we’d all be satisfied with Garmin Connect (or whatever other nonsocial GPS app you might pick from).
People want to post pictures of the sunrise on their morning runs. People want to flex their big vert days. People want KUDOS!
By publicly posting your activity with a hidden map, especially accompanied by photos of the sick powder skiing or secret bike trails that The Public isn’t allowed to know about, you’re saying to the world “look what I know that you don’t.” To those that are In On It, you’re saying “Look! I know! I too am in the club!”
Read C.S. Lewis’ The Inner Ring. Gatekeeping is lame and bad for your soul. Lewis said:
The torture allotted to the Danaids in the classical underworld, that of attempting to fill sieves with water, is the symbol not of one vice, but of all vices. It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had. The desire to be inside the invisible line illustrates this rule. As long as you are governed by that desire you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left. Until you conquer the fear of being an outsider, an outsider you will remain.
Claiming local status (especially not after having lived in Jackson/Summit County/RFV/SLC/wherever for like two winters) is eyeroll-inducing. Locality is just one of a hundred Rings to aspire to gain entry to or to exclude others from. Trying to reinforce your self-esteem by posting powder stash thirst traps is like filling sieves with water. It won’t work.
There are big campaigns to, e.g., “keep Jackson wild.” Not geotagging spots to prevent them from being loved to death is great ethics! I’m all for that! But even better ethics, if this is something you’re genuinely concerned about, is keeping the whole activity private. Don’t spray photos without a map.
If you’ve got a real reason to keep something private—one of safety, professional obligation, out of respect to someone’s request, recreating on private property, etc.— then by all means you should do so. And hey, maybe you do have a genuine, hidden, super-secret zone to ski in Marble that no one knows about!
But do us all a favor and either don’t record it or hide the whole activity. I’m tired of clout chasers clogging up my feed.
Disclaimer: This post was not inspired by any individual in particular but has instead been a part of a yearslong conversation with my friend Ian inspired by Strava behavior throughout the Mountain West. With that said, if you read this and thought it was about you… then maybe you should look at yourself hard in the mirror and ask if you’re acting like one of the Danaids.
Hiding maps is a vain attention grab at best and dangerous baiting etiquette at worst (I am talking about backcountry skiing only - I don't care about the run around your boring city or neighborhood). There is almost always enough context in a post to understand the general zone someone is skiing in. Your followers will find the powder and without the proper beta they'll set out above the "locals only" established skin-track and unnecessarily put others in danger (this happened to me on Buffalo Mountain in Summit County, CO), etc.
It is ironic how Colorado mountain towns maintain incredibly persistent gatekeeping cultures despite having the most sensitive snowpacks in the Rockies. Meanwhile, information is shared far more freely in the Wasatch and Tetons, and skiers are (generally) kept safer as a result.
Great post. It's making me question whether or not I should use Strava at all. I'm fairly against other social media platforms, and Strava doesn't seem to really be any different except for the data veneer and the fact that you actually have to do something to post. I use my watch app (Suunto)+ Google Sheets for training tracking, and so Strava really just is a vanity project.