Beyond Mileposts isn’t a company, it is a small blog started which then grew into a small crew of stubborn outdoor people who got tired of reading trip reports written by folks who clearly never went on the trip.
It started back in 2017, out of the back of a Subaru with a cracked windshield and a half-charged laptop. A lot of miles and a lot of bad gas-station coffee later, we’re still doing the same thing. Showing up at trailheads. Sleeping in the dirt. Writing about what we actually find out there.
We cover hiking, camping, RV life, and the kinds of places that don’t usually make the top-ten lists. Every guide on this site comes from someone on our team who has been there. We don’t run sponsored fluff pieces. We don’t publish AI-written filler. If we say a trail is worth the drive, it’s because we drove it ourselves. Usually more than once. When we make mistakes, we correct them. No asterisks, no excuses.
This is the team behind it.
Megan Caldwell
Chief Editor
Megan spent over ten years in operations and customer success, most recently at Riverbed, where the job was keeping things from quietly breaking and fixing them fast when they did. She studied at Indiana University Bloomington, landed in Chattanooga, and has stayed there, which she’ll tell you was a good call given what’s accessible from that city on a free weekend.
She’s hiked a lot of the Southeast, worked her way through chunks of the Southwest and Pacific Northwest, and has a consistent habit of adding a side trail or a scenic detour that turns a reasonable day into a very long one. She’s fine with this.
At Beyond Mileposts, she edits everything before it goes live. That means fixing the trail distances that don’t match the actual route, cutting gear recommendations that don’t survive basic scrutiny, and removing the phrase “hidden gem” from drafts with a regularity that has started to feel personal. She’s also the person who pushed to make the planning sections of every guide actually useful instead of just present.
Tyler Hayes
Hiking & Trails Editor
Tyler has worked in claims litigation for 18 years, currently at Tokio Marine HCC in Los Angeles. He studied at Cal State Dominguez Hills. The job is mostly about building an accurate picture from incomplete information, catching the detail that changes everything, and not being surprised by something that was visible the whole time if you’d looked carefully. He does the same thing with trails.
He joined the team in 2020. Since then he’s become the person the rest of us send a route to when something feels off about it, because he’ll have already checked the permit situation, pulled the elevation profile, looked at recent trip reports, and noticed the section where the description stops matching the terrain. It’s a little annoying and also very useful.
His writing focuses on the practical stuff: where the trail actually gets hard, what the approach looks like in different seasons, which gear decisions matter and which ones don’t. He covers a lot of trails that don’t show up on the first page of search results, partly because he likes finding them and partly because they’re usually better. Based in LA. Happiest somewhere without cell service. Drinks his coffee black and has feelings about hiking shoes he’ll share at the slightest opportunity.
Rachel Alvarez
RV & Camping Editor
Rachel is a makeup artist based in Miami. She also really likes camping, which surprises people until they spend five minutes talking to her about it and realize she approaches both things the same way: figure out what you actually need, get good at it, ignore the rest.
She’s been doing client work and building content around beauty for years. On weekends and whenever she can stretch a booking gap into something longer, she’s been on road trips, at campgrounds, and slowly working her way through more of the South and Southeast than most people she knows have seen. She joined Beyond Mileposts because the way the site writes about outdoor travel matched how she actually does it, which is without pretending the bugs don’t exist or that every campsite looks like the photos.
Her coverage is for people who want to actually go outside and have a good time, not people training for something. Beginner RV advice, campground finds worth the drive, weekend escapes where the goal is to come back feeling like you actually rested. She’s also extremely good at figuring out where the nearest decent coffee is, which she considers a non-negotiable part of any trip plan.
Got a trail tip, a question about a rig, or a campsite we should know about? Drop us a line. We read every email, even if it takes us a couple of days to find service.
