New Forum Suggestion: wilderness equipment, outdoorsmanship, trekking advice, etc.

I know there's a strong argument against creating a zillion forums for every little subject that relates to nature photography. Some subjects aren't popular enough to have enough readers/posters, it clutters up the site, and people can be confused about which forum to post in. However, there's one subject where I think having a new forum would be very helpful. Talk about what equipment to use in the outdoors, how to survive and how to be comfortable doing it seems to relate very closely nature photography.

It's very common to see someone asking about what's the best type of snowshoes, what should you pack on your first backpacking trip or what are some good backcountry cooking recipes. And all those questions are influenced by our goal of making great images while in the wilderness, so asking the question here is probably better than asking on some other site. Unfortunately right now all those posts are scattered around a lot of different forums on NPN: General Discussion, Equipment Reviews and all of the regional forums. The forum with the most relevant info might actually be the RMNP forum, which of course is mostly read by the members in that area.

Discussions about the wilderness seem to be pretty popular nonetheless, so I think if a new forum were created it would be popular as well. Is creating and moderating a new forum feasible for the NPN staff? Would members be interested in participating?

I hope I'm not out of line suggesting this, and I'm sorry if it's already been suggested and rejected before. Thanks for your time!

You're right, it gets overwhelming to have too many forums... Since most trips of that nature would be centered around landscape photography, you would be more than welcome to make such a post in the landscape photo disc. forum. In fact, one of the first posts there is about those very topics.

I think part of the problem is that all the threads are dispersed all around NPN, so it's a little tricky to search or keep up to date on the topic. If all the members could agree that they would post the wilderness threads to the Landscape forum then it would be fine with me. But how would you get everyone to do that?

Yes... though out of the general NPN forums it seems to me to be the most applicable one. The trouble you might be referring to is the divide between the regional forums and the general NPN forums, and that's something that wouldn't be 'solved' by an additional forum. The idea behind the landscape discussion forum was to consolidate all landscape photography related posts, to try and avoid precisely what you bring up: scattered posts. It's unlikely there would be more than a few posts in such a specialized forum every month, and inactivity leads to more inactivity....