The planning is the crux.

Divide started the way most tools do: with a spreadsheet that got out of hand. Trip after trip, the pattern held — the route took an evening, and everything around it took weeks. Permit lotteries with application windows six months out. Camps that book in minutes. A forecast that means one thing at the trailhead and another thing at 11,000 feet.

The apps that exist pick a lane. Trail apps do trails, and stop at the trailhead. Mapping tools do maps, brilliantly, and assume you already know what you're doing. Nothing holds the whole trip — the days, the cairns, the paperwork, the weather calls — in one place that a normal person can read.

So Divide is two things on purpose. A planning service, where I take the whole problem off your hands for a flat fee. And a planner, where you do it yourself with the same tool I use for clients. The service keeps the tool honest: every feature exists because a real trip needed it.

The name is from the divides — the lines where watersheds split, where routes commit, where you decide which side of the ridge you're sleeping on. Every trip starts with a decision point.

— Malcolm