The Instagram Experiment in Ranking Hiking Difficulty
What makes a hike “hard”?
Why do some routes feel impossible to one person and casual to another?
And why did our Instagram difficulty experiment got 300,000 views and exploded into a storm of opinions, contradictions, and zero usable data?
In this episode, Philip and Jason pull back the curtain on the Blisterpop Difficulty Scale — the five‑pillar system designed to bring clarity to a world full of noise. They break down why rating difficulty is so challenging, why crowdsourced answers always collapse, and how the scale measures physical load, environmental severity, technicality, logistics…
The skinny
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