Guest posts on OutdoorAdept

Write For Us

OutdoorAdept publishes hiking guides written from first-hand experience. Every guide on this site comes from someone who has done the thing: miles walked, blisters earned, wrong turns taken so you can skip them. If you want to write for us, your story has to clear the same bar as our own work.

  • First-hand experience only
  • Real trips, real photos
  • Never sponsored, ever

Fair warning: this page is mostly a list of reasons we will say no. That is deliberate. If you read it and think “that’s exactly the kind of piece I have”, we genuinely want to hear from you, and a real person will reply to your pitch.

What fits

What we publish from guest writers

Trip reports & trail guides

Routes you have actually walked: honest difficulty, navigation quirks, water sources, logistics, and what the guidebooks got wrong.

A skill learned the hard way

A hiking skill taught through a real incident: the day it went wrong, and what you do differently now.

Foot health & fit stories

What you tried for your flat feet, plantar fasciitis, or wide feet, and what actually changed on trail.

Long-term gear experiences

Gear you bought with your own money and used long enough to know what breaks, what lasts, and what surprised you.

The bar

Every submission has to clear this

The test we apply to every draft, including our own: could a chatbot have written this without the author existing? If yes, we will not publish it, no matter how polished it is.

What makes the answer “no” is evidence from your own experience. We look for at least three of these:

  • A first-person account of a specific hike or incident (“I hiked”, not “hikers should”)
  • Your own photos of the actual place or thing (at least 3, no stock images)
  • Numbers you measured yourself: distances, times, temperatures, weights, costs
  • A specific place and date (“Velebit, May 2026”, not “a recent trip”)
  • A mistake you made and what it cost you
  • Something the guidebooks or product pages did not tell you

We will ask follow-up questions about your trip that only the person who was there can answer. That is not distrust; it is how we protect what this site stands for.

Hard passes

What we do not publish

  • General advice pieces assembled from other articles (“10 Tips for…”, “How to Choose…”)
  • Content marketing for a brand, product, or service, whether disclosed or not
  • Paid placements, sponsored posts, or link insertions. We never accept money, free products, or favors in exchange for coverage, and that applies to guest content too. Offering payment ends the conversation.
  • AI-generated or AI-padded text. Tools may help you polish, but the experience, the details, and the voice must be yours.
  • Anything previously published elsewhere, including on your own blog
The deal

What you get

An author byline under your real name, a 2 to 3 sentence bio, and one link to your personal site, blog, or social profile. We do not publish anonymous guest posts: our readers trust advice because they can see who it comes from.

Links inside the article must point to sources a reader genuinely needs, such as park authorities, permit pages, or trail associations. Commercial links are removed. We do not guarantee followed links and we do not discuss “DR” or “link juice”. If that is what you are after, we are not the right site, and that is fine: there are plenty of others.

We do not pay for guest posts. Our writing budget goes to our own field testing.

House style

Style, in short

  • First person, conversational but precise. Write like you are telling a capable friend what happened.
  • Be honest about what went wrong. A flawless trip report reads like fiction.
  • Specifics beat generalities: “four hours of rain on the descent” beats “bad weather”.
  • Usually 1,200 to 2,500 words. Long enough to be useful, no padding.
  • For trail pieces: access, parking or transport, permits, season, bailout options, and a GPX track if you recorded one.
Getting started

How to pitch

Do not write the article yet. Email us a short pitch first:

  1. Tell the story in 3 to 5 sentencesWhere you went or what happened, when, and what the reader will learn from it.
  2. Attach 2 or 3 of your photosYour own shots from the trip, so we can see the piece is real before either of us invests time.
  3. One line about youYour hiking background and why you are the right person to write this.

Send your pitch with the subject line “Guest post pitch”.We reply to every genuine pitch, usually within a week.

Email your pitch

If a pitch becomes a draft, we edit for clarity, structure, and house style, we fact-check distances and place names, and you see the final version before it goes live. We can decline a draft at any stage if it does not meet the bar. We know that is strict; it is why the site is worth publishing on. Generic outreach emails, bulk pitches, and anything mentioning payment, link placement, or “collaboration opportunities” will not get a response.

Keep reading

What to read before you pitch

Next up Join Our Team One piece is a guest post. If you want to write here regularly, with a byline that keeps building, that is a different conversation and this page explains it. Or read Editorial Standards Why commercial links come out and why payment ends the conversation: the rules your piece would be published under.

Curious who you would be writing alongside? Meet the team on About. To see what “evidence from your own experience” looks like in our own work, read How We Test.