Live closer to the edge of what's real.

I'm from New York. Came to Virginia Tech for school. Went home after.

My dad took me camping when I was a kid. We had woods behind the house, and that's where I spent most of my time growing up. Got into backpacking in college, and something shifted. There's a quiet that shows up around night three on a trail, when the noise in your head finally disappears, and after I felt it once, I wanted the rest of my life to make room for it.

I started @rawhikes_ because the outdoors had been sold to me wrong. Every video on my feed acted like you needed Iceland and a drone for it to count. You don't. The world is beautiful from a trail an hour from where you live. The point was never the photo. It was being out in something long enough to come back different. I wanted to show what that actually looked like.

RAW OUTDOORS is the same idea, bigger. Guided trips for people who are done waiting. A brand built for a life that doesn't fit on a screen. The version I'm building toward is simple: a group of people who came to be present instead of post, no service, nothing to scroll. That's it.

I haven't figured any of this out. I'm doing the next thing that scares me and bringing people with me.

— Colin