The Divide, and the Triple Crown
Our sixth app walks the Continental Divide Trail with Aldo Leopold, 3,037 miles from Mexico to Canada, and completes the Triple Crown with the Pacific Crest Trail and Appalachia.
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From Canterbury to Rome
Sacred Steps: Road to Rome is out. A letter on the Via Francigena: Sigeric’s list of 990, the road over the Alps, a credential of 72 stamps from Canterbury Cathedral to St Peter’s, and why Chaucer knew why we walk.
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Designing for iPhone Duo
One app, three shapes. How we redesigned Nature Steps: Appalachia for a phone that opens: the map beside the page, a tab bar that moves to the side, onboarding that lines up in every pose, and one design on every iPhone from iOS 18 on.
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From Springer Mountain to Katahdin
Nature Steps: Appalachia is out. A letter on the oldest mountains in America, the forests that change from Georgia hardwoods to Maine spruce as you walk north, the 105 species in the Field Journal, and Henry David Thoreau on the summit of Katahdin.
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Buen Camino
Sacred Steps: The Camino is out. A letter on the three roads to Santiago (the Francés, the Norte and the Portugués), the credential that fills with town stamps as you walk, the yellow arrows that mark the way, and the four extra days to the sea at Finisterre.
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From the Sonoran desert to the North Cascades
Nature Steps: The PCT is out. A letter on what 2,650 miles of trail actually crosses: the granite of the Sierra, the volcanoes of the Cascades, the rain shadow that divides the whole range, and why the Field Journal hands you a different set of species every few hundred miles.
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What a month of walking changes
A letter to walkers thirty days into Sacred Steps: The Temple Path. What the science actually says about daily walking — mortality, mood, the hippocampus, sleep — plus a few observations about what pilgrimage walking seems to add on top, and a quiet word for anyone whose habit has already wobbled.
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Eighty-eight temples, and the trouble with the English sources
A note on the research craft behind Sacred Steps: The Temple Path. The popular English-language guides to the Shikoku 88-temple pilgrimage share a problem — they tend to repeat each other, and a small number of errors have propagated for decades. Here are seven we corrected, where the right answers came from, and why we think it matters.
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A week on the trail
The most common question we get is the most reasonable one: what is it actually like, day to day? Below is a journal of one pilgrim's first seven days inside Sacred Steps: The Temple Path — six temples, sixteen kilometers, and the quiet rhythm a virtual pilgrimage starts to take in the corners of an ordinary week.
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Why we built Sacred Steps: The Temple Path
Dear walker — somewhere on the southern Japanese island of Shikoku, a 9th-century monk drew a line between eighty-eight temples and started a thousand-year tradition. This is the story of how we set out to bring that trail to your pocket, what we built along the way, and the family of adventures we're crafting next.
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