The Woods Don't Care About Your Follower Count

Let me describe something I witnessed last spring at a trailhead in the Trinity Alps that has been living rent-free in my head ever since, like a bad country song you can't unhum.

A woman (maybe twenty-eight, hair professionally tousled in the way that takes forty-five minutes) climbed out of a bone-white Sprinter van with a ring light strapped to a gorilla pod and a camera guy who, I kid you not, was wearing a safari vest with the tags still on it. She walked approximately thirty feet from the parking lot to a granite boulder, sat on it, looked at the horizon with the practiced expression of someone who had just understood something profound about the human condition, and stayed that way for eleven minutes while the camera guy circled her like a very confused moon.

She did not look at the trees. She did not listen to the creek. She did not pick up a rock or smell the air or do a single thing a person actually does when they go outside. She was not in the wilderness. She was using the wilderness as a backdrop. There is a difference. A significant one. And we need to talk about it.

Day 47 of living in my sacred vessel. The mountains called and I answered, right after my ring light finished charging. #vanlife #freesoul #intentionalliving #blessed

The outdoor content industrial complex has produced a specific subspecies of human that I have taken to calling the Forest Ghost. The Forest Ghost does not actually go into the woods. The Forest Ghost manifests in the woods, briefly, for content, then dematerializes back to the nearest coffee shop with usable WiFi to spend four hours editing footage of themselves looking windswept.

You know exactly who I'm talking about. They show up in your feed doing a handstand in Lululemon on the roof of their "sacred vessel" aka Sprinter van. They post "sunrise views" photos that were taken at 2pm because the light was better. They call themselves "outdoor enthusiasts" with the same energy a guy who owns one Jim Beam t-shirt calls himself a bourbon connoisseur.

The van is always white. I don't know why, but it's always white. Factory white, like it rolled off the assembly line directly into a sponsored post. They'll spend $8,000 on custom cabinet pulls and not own a single item from a hardware store. The whole build was designed around where the camera goes, not where the human lives. There's a difference between a rig and a prop, and I have been keeping a running list.

Here's what gets me. What actually gets me, deep in the chest like a poorly-aimed trekking pole. It's not even that these people exist. People have always done stupid things outdoors. I've been doing stupid things outdoors for thirty years and I don't need a comment section to validate them. What gets me is the implied premise: that the point of going outside is to be seen going outside.

It isn't. The point of going outside is to go outside.

Nobody's picking their girlfriend up by a van after fourteen days of sharing forty square feet and one USB-C outlet unless a camera is involved. These two have had the same argument about dish soap eleven times. She cried in a gas station bathroom in Bahia de los Angeles He stress-ate an entire bag of pistachios outside Mulege. And yet. Golden hour. Lift. Post.

I know that sounds aggressively obvious. It shouldn't need to be said. And yet here we are, watching someone do a "get ready with me for a solo desert camp" video that has seventeen separate outfit changes and not a single mention of the Sonoran Desert's ecological significance, or the indigenous nations whose land it is, or even what kind of cactus that is in the background. (It's a saguaro. They're protected. You cannot legally remove or damage them. This is important. Put your phone down.)

The wilderness is not a filter. It is not an aesthetic. It is not a brand partnership waiting to happen between you and a freeze-dried meal company that somehow makes backpacking feel like a sponsored brunch.

There is a particular brand of dishonesty in the influencer-outdoors pipeline that I find philosophically offensive, and I say that as someone who once ate gas station sushi in a blizzard outside Bend, Oregon, so my threshold for offense is calibrated higher than most.

These creators have convinced an enormous audience that the entire value of a wild place is in how it photographs. The sequence is: find pretty place, position self in pretty place, extract content from pretty place, leave pretty place. No knowledge transferred. No reverence demonstrated. No acknowledgment that the pretty place had a geological history, a fire ecology, a watershed, a name it was given by people who actually understood it, before you parked your white van in front of it and did a morning routine video.

What gets published is the moment before the experience. What gets cut is the experience itself.

I want to be fair here. A small, grudging, Nigel-Washburn-calibrated version of fair. There are people making outdoor content who actually know things. Who have calluses. Who can read a topo map without their phone. Who will tell you, unprompted, why that meadow is wet in July and what that means about the snowpack and why you should care. Those people exist. I have met four of them. They all have beat-up rigs and bad WiFi and their channels grow slowly because they keep stopping to look at stuff instead of filming themselves looking at stuff. They will be fine.

Nobody straps on a bikini at 30 degrees in a campsite outside Bend because they're comfortable. They do it because Instagram's engagement data is undefeated and everyone in this industry knows it. The algorithm doesn't care about your hypothermia. It cares about the scroll-stop rate.

Everyone else. Everyone who found out that a tent in golden hour gets 40,000 impressions and decided that was the whole game. I'm talking to you.

The forest does not require your witness. It was here before you arrived and it will be here after your analytics dashboard tells you this content performed below average. The creek is not listening for your voiceover. The elk do not care about your three-two-one countdown.

Leave the ring light in the van. Leave the Lululemon for the yoga studio. Leave the performance at home. Go outside. Actually go outside.