Last January we turned 6 years old! In our 6th year we expanded the website with new features, tried new types of events and even had a zombie infection (virtual) ravage during our hikes!
But before we get into all of that, let us have a look at the numbers that this year has brought with it. In case you're curious about a comparison with last year, you can find the 2023 review here.
2024 in numbers
This year we had 193 new members signing up to the website. Of those, 86 actually joined us on events.
Talking about events, this year we organized 19 events!
During those 19 events we had a total of 327 participants (112 unique people).
Those 112 people walked a combined total of 4607 km and ascended 127 km!
We walked for a sum of 61 days.
We took 1929 photos of you. Some of which you’ll find back in the video recap up above.
What's new?
This year we added many new features to the website/experience in general. Starting of with achievement badge system we added at the beginning of the year. Now everyone can collect badges while being outside with us, from distance and ascent achievements to special events, social milestones and even a triathlon badge! As of right now there are 72 different badges, each with their own special design that are available. Check out yours on the statistics page!
During our full moon hike in February something special happened! We had a zombie outbreak in the group, patient zero turned due to the moonlights and infected other hikes. This infection has been been spreading through our community, and with every passing event more hikers get infected! Being infected even rewards you a special badge, and infecting 5 other hikers also comes with an achievement. You can read all about the infection, its backstory and who has bitten who on our Zombie Outbreak page.
For Easter we tried something new, an event dubbed The Great Egg Hunt. Usually we are all about social engagement during our event, but this one was more of a solo adventure. We hid 6 egg caches on different locations around Bayreuth and create a trail of riddles for each one. Then, twelve brave egg-hunters set off to solve the riddles and be the first ones to collect their prizes. For this we even created a WhatsApp bot named Bunny Whiskers to guide the players through the riddles. To find out more about this special event you can visit the Egg Hunt page.
Later in the year we then added the long awaited option to pay via IBAN for our special events, removing the pesky PayPal fees. But for those who want, PayPal is also still an option! We even added a QR code for supported banking apps to make the payment for events easy and painless.
Another new website feature is the added support for multi-sport events. This means that we can now have events with multiple sport types like biking and hiking, or canoeing and hiking with separated statistics. This also comes with a new bike and peddle distance in your statistics page! On the map for each event the different types are displayed with different colors.
And lastly, we dipped our toes into doing more videos with Route Walk Throughs. These are videos out on our trails in real time. Ever wondered how a specific route looks like? Just watch the video! Looking for some nice slow TV of beautiful nature, put on our videos! So far we have created two, but more are following soon! And as added bonus, each video also has telemetry data like GPS path, elevation graph, bearing, temperature and more! Here you find the first two videos:
[4K Walk Through] Kleiner Kulm, Pegnitz
[4K Walk Through] Plankenfels
Thank you!
Without any and all of you it would have never been such a fun year full of extraordinary events. 112 people were crazy enough to join our hikes, canoe and weekend trips. And many of you are showing up almost every event, much love for you and a big thank you for all the good times!
But my biggest thank you goes out to those who supported the Mountain Club with their time and effort this year. Andrew, Yanick and Mirna, I very much appreciate the energy you put into events, be it organizing, hiding boxes, explaining game rules to participants and everything else you did to make the events unforgettable for all of us. It's what pushes the Mountain Club to be something greater than one person alone could achieve. Thank you! ❤️
All that rests me to say is that I hope everyone enjoyed the events just as much as we did. We will do our stinking best to make 2025 at least as fun and filled with events as any of the past years. You can expect more hikes in any and all weather. More orienteering games, we aim to look for new hiking locations and do more weekend adventures. For now it's still winter so we hope for a bit more snow so we can have some fun snow filled events like snowshoe hiking and maybe even sledding. Stay tuned for more exciting things to come!
Your highlights?
What are your highlights of this past year? Did you make new friends, tried something new, did something you thought you weren't capable of? Let us know in the comments below! Also, what would you like for us to plan for the upcoming year, new places to visit, new activities to organize? We'd love to have your input to make the Mountain Club events even more fun and memorable!
