About NevadaHiking
How this started
I started NevadaHiking because I wanted somewhere to go on weekends. Mostly I was looking for things worth photographing — old buildings, strange landscapes, anything that looked like it had a story behind it. For a while that meant scrolling around satellite view on Google Maps until something caught my eye.
Eventually I started asking AI models for help. Nothing sophisticated at first:what's interesting near Tonopah?, then chasing whatever came back until I turned up the places nobody bothers to write about. Those searches piled up, and the pile is what became the dataset behind this site.
The first version of it was rough. I ran a few different research tools over what I had and asked them to fill in gaps, which got me to roughly 200 places. But the bigger the list got, the more obvious the problems were — the same site listed twice under two names, coordinates that put you a mile off, entries where I couldn't tell where the information had come from.
So I rebuilt the process. These days a coordinating model runs point on a team of eight or nine research agents, each assigned its own state or region. They work from an approved set of sources — government geographic records, public datasets — to tighten up coordinates and record where every claim came from. I still go through the results myself. It isn't hands-off, but it's a lot less haphazard than typing prompts and hoping.
The photography is still the real point. Ghost towns, historic buildings, natural monuments — anything with some geological or cultural weight to it. The site is where I keep that research organized, automate the tedious part of finding places, and put the whole thing somewhere other people can use it.
The long-term goal is simple: zoom in almost anywhere on the map and find something worth the drive.