High Sierra Topix

We loved this story in the San Jose Mercury News about a computer whiz who is also a backpacker, and needed to figure out a way to get his permit for the John Muir Trail. So what did he do?

Yep, he designed a bot! The full story is here:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/04/22/ ... uir-trail/

Or, if you are talented in this direction, here is a link to his code:

The source code for hackjohn is available at https://github.com/dhimmel/hackjohn under the permissive MIT License. To learn more, go to https://busy.org/@dhimmel/introducing-t ... il-permits.

To learn more about the John Muir Trail, or to submit an application to the National Park Service’s lottery, go to https://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/jmtfaq.htm.

Doesn't solve the problem of too many people competing for a limited resource, but does increase the "digital divide".

What happens if lots of Silicon Valley engineers (and others) pick up his code and run it? Then vacancies, instead of lasting "for a few minutes", as the article describes, and going randomly to whomever happened to check at that time, will instead last for a few microseconds and only ever go to the hackers.

Personally, I'd rather see all cancellations from the initial lottery go back into the "walk-up" queue so they end up going to folks who have already committed to visiting the park. This would also allow more non-JMT hikers to use those trailheads for shorter trips.

-Phil