A metamorphosis

In 2025, a new chapter of Mind The Moss begins

Miles Howard

Dec 21, 2024

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Dear Moss People,

Most of us tend to think of moss as this green fuzz that carpets the soggier places of the earth; as enduringly verdant as Nick Nolte’s voice is timelessly gravelly. But in fact, moss is constantly oscillating between color palattes. Whenever it’s exposed to lots of sunlight, moss can turn yellowy. And when it’s deprived of water, moss will start to brown. Certain pathogens or fungi can even add streaks of blue to sphagnum moss!

A newsletter about unusual hiking is no different. Since its inception in the summer of 2021, Mind The Moss has been shaped by two environmental events—the growth and diversification of modern hiking communities *and* the decline of the legacy media industry. I decided to launch Mind The Moss because I was getting tired of having to persuade editors at household name magazines and newspapers that there was an audience for hiking stories that featured gritty urban trails, ancient railroad corridors, or caves that once served as hideouts for arsonists. Even when I did persuade editors that these stories were worth telling, we often ran into the walls created by algorthims, which incentivize publishing the same old leaf peeping or peak bagging articles that we’ve read a hundred times. I could also sense a hunger for stories that re-imagined what “hiking” can be—stories that reached beyond the standard snowcapped peaks and expensive gear lists that still dominate the traditional outdoor media landscape.

Nonetheless, all of you blew my expectations out of the water. Over three years later, this newsletter has reached its highest subscriber count ever. The Moss is still green!

So happy three year anniversary (and a half) to all of us! And THANK YOU to all of you who made it possible to turn Mind The Moss into part of my career as a writer.

Whether you’ve joined the party recently or have been reading since 2021, I’d like to take a few minutes this week to tell you where things stand. And where we’re going.

It’s not a stretch to say that when Mind The Moss got crackling, during the second summer of the pandemic, we were living in a different time. I had hair that touched my shoulders. It was still cumbersome to travel beyond our regional surroundings without risking signficiant illness or the economic headache of an entire trip being axed. And the hiking bonanza that we’re now living through was still in the process of escalating. Given all of this, publishing a newsletter about unconventional hikes that would focus almost entirely on New England territory felt right to me. It was a natural extension of how I decided to approach hiking on a personal level at that time, when we were emerging from one of the most stressful, surreal years of our lives. (So far).

Until now, Mind The Moss has taken place in a post-disaster landscape; a beguiling, sometimes jarring period in which relief and catharsis have been paired with lingering anger, grief, and uncertainty. Those of you who read my recent story about the mirror mountains of Vermont and Quebec—Brousseau Mountain and Mount Pinnacle—might recall how I described this collision of feelings. It was this weird sensation of having scaled a great peak, while knowing that beyond the horizon, there were “much bigger and gnarlier mountains which would eventually come into focus.” We had just made it through the worst of a global pandemic, thanks to the development of vaccines, and yet, the cost of staying in a hospital could still be as expensive as buying a brand new Honda CR-V. A lot of people who had been struggling to afford housing had finally managed to buy property during the brief real estate plunge that occurred in the early months of the pandemic, before housing prices shot back up again, leaving millions more out in the cold. We had just made Donald Trump a one-term president, but the cruelty of his rhetoric on immigrants, women, and people with disabilities continued to fester and infect public forums. And then…well…we all know what happened next.

While I tend to keep my politics somewhat beneath the surface of Mind The Moss, it’s probably no surprise to many of you that I’m a person who believes that all human beings should be afforded rights that uphold the shared dignity in being human. And that the powerful should not be exempt from rules that govern society. So, for me and a lot of you, the dark place where we now find ourselves is the abrupt end of the post-disaster landscape in which Mind The Moss was created. The return of Donald Trump and the expansion of his base is a new disaster to deal with. Yes, it’s comprised of old demons, resentments, and profound immiseration for which neither one of our major political parties has offered real answers. But the scope of who’s vulnerable is new. The extent of what’s at stake and what will soon be demanded of millions of us (as we try to resist what’s coming and create an alternative to Trumpism) is also new.

In a disaster landscape like this, what should a newsletter like Mind The Moss do?

I’ve talked about this with quite a few of you over these last few weeks. I’ve mulled it over privately for the last few months—knowing that it would soon be time for Mind The Moss to grow beyond its roots, but unsure of what path to take. And today, as we approach the door of 2025, anxious but clear-eyed about how the color and texture of our environment have transformed…I have found a new path through that landscape.

Starting in January, Mind The Moss will undergo a metamorphosis, in three respects.

#1: After 3.5 years of being an unusual “hiking” newsletter, Mind The Moss will become a newsletter about the modern Renaissance of walking. Now, this might sound like a seismic shift, but the change will be subtler then you may assume. We’ll still be visiting many outdoor environments on foot—cities, mountains, beaches, suburbs, deserts, protected forests, and the moodiest industrial zones. The same countercultural spirit and “feel the burrito crumbs on your jacket” voice of Mind The Moss will endure. And one of the foundational intentions of Mind The Moss will still be getting you outside, whether it’s in your own “backyard” or a more distant locale.

The reason why I’m making this transition from “hiking” to “walking” is because I have spent the last three years attempting to demystify the word “hiking.” Why? Because our conception of hiking often brings to mind real or perceived barriers that dissuade many people from exploring the outdoors on foot. While I do think our idea of hiking is starting to become more agnosticized, the ground reality—which I’ve heard from a lot of folks in the field—is that “hiking” is still a loaded word that carries implications such as “must have lots of gear” and “only for the hardcore.” A tougher reality is that many experienced hikers don’t want our idea of hiking to become agnosticized. When I was pitching this recent story on Instant Urban Trails to Outside magazine, I was told, quite candidly, that stories based in urban areas generally got a lukewarm reception.

”Walking” is a more inclusive and less intimidating way to desribe what hiking is. I’ve leaned into that lately, in my writing and in my work as a trail builder in Boston. And it feels good. Seguing from hiking to walking feels like a way of recognizing the natural adventurism of many kinds of foot journeys, and it’s also a way to bring more people through a secret back door into the hiking landscape. That remains one of my goals.

And that brings me to the second thing that’s changing in 2025.

#2: The stoytelling scope of Mind The Moss will expand beyond New England, in a couple of ways. It has been nothing short of incredible to get to spend three years writing almost exclusively about localized hikes in my favorite nook of America. And it would be very easy to double down on this in 2025—turning inward and tuning out what’s happening beyond New England. While I do believe that localizing political engagment over the next few years (and hopefully beyond) is going to be extremely important—because local actions and elections lead to the most tangible changes in our daily lives—the range of walking stories I plan to tell in 2025 is national in scope. Some of them even take place beyond the U.S. Again, this change will be subtler than you might expect. We’ve occasionally ventured outside New England before, visiting destinations like the staircases nestled in Pittsburgh’s south side slopes, or the 66 Lakes Trail that encircles Berlin, allowing hikers to traipse between woods and clubs.

So expect more of this in 2025—more walking stories that illuminate the wider world of foot travel, the people who make our world interesting, and the ideas that can bring us together. And in addition to the grander geographic scope, expect walking stories inspired by what’s happening in the U.S. and beyond; stories that simultaneously offer a scenic reprieve from what’s happening and an alternative means of reckoning with what you’re seeing on the news or hearing through your social networks. For a taste of this, consider revisiting my recent story about exploring part of the Robert Frost Trail in Western Massachusetts and thinking about the contradictions of our luminaries, and our families and friends. If you dug that story, then you’ll really dig what’s coming.

The old tagline for Mind The Moss—”Unusual hiking in New England”—shall now be, “Walking into a better world. Literally.” Because walking is more than traveling from Point A to Point B on foot. It’s an intimate way of engaging with your home, with the unfamiliar places beyond your community, and with humanity in general. It can offer grounding and inspiration; sometimes on the same walk! And when I think about the way through the next few years—the important conversations, the collective actions, and the inevitable valleys of recovering and recharging—I imagine a lot of footprints.

Last but not least…

#3: Mind The Moss will have fewer paywalls. Starting in January, I will be removing the paywall for at least 50% of new Mind The Moss stories, to give the newsletter more room for growing. As some of you will remember, I took the opposite approach last winter—sticking most of Mind The Moss behind the paywall, after two years of offering a 50/50 ratio of free stories and paid subscriber stories. I did this because reader engagement with the newsletter and free-to-paid subscriber conversions had escalated to the point where I felt confident enough to lean into the demonstrated value of the newsletter that I had spent the last two years building. And many of you responded to this change by choosing to directly support the newsletter with paid subscriptions, which I’m humbled by and grateful for. That’s why the archive of Mind The Moss, from its 2021 inception to this point in 2024, will mostly remain paywalled.

But for the new chapter of Mind The Moss, I am opening up the newsletter more than ever before. Because I believe that walking and stories about walking will help many of us process the events that will shape our lives during the next few years, and I want to make these stories more widely available—to those who can and cannot afford a paid subscription. Many writers who’ve launched their own newsletters, like Heather Cox Richardson, Hamilton Nolan, and Mind The Moss guest author Bill Shaner (who publishes Worcester Sucks and I Love It) have employed this model successfully; cultivating large subscriber bases and persuading a small percentage to support their newsletters with paid subscriptions. I am going to be making this pivot myself next year—opening up more of Mind The Moss on the hope that “free” stories will not deter every Mind The Moss reader from considering a paid subscription to the newsletter.

Relationships between journalists and their audiences are increasingly starting to look more like the relationship between artists and patrons, or nonprofits and membership bases. The question of how we fund journalism in the near future has seldom looked murkier than it does now. The traditional paywalled and ad revenue-based model has been collapsing for the last decade, and one of the ripple effects of this collapse has been the growth of a so-called “creator economy” in which self-published newsletters from writers who once worked for big magazines and newspapers offer some of the same things we used to get from those magazines and newspapers. There are very few mainstream media outlets for travel writing in Massachusetts and I’m confident in saying that there are no outlets publishing stories like the ones that you’ve read in Mind The Moss. Or the new stories that I’m looking forward to publishing in 2025.

So, that’s the scoop! Mind The Moss is becoming more colorful, more inclusive, and more reflective of these strange, unsettling times in which we find ourselves looking for a new map. I hope that learning about these changes to the newsletter leaves you excited for what’s coming. But I also recognize that all of you subscribed to Mind The Moss when the newsletter was still described as “Unusual hiking in New England” and I understand that these changes might impact the overall value that the newsletter has for you. However you decide to go from here, I thank you for making it possible for Mind The Moss to reach this evolutionary juncture. Prost! And happiest of holidays.

~Miles