Hi there. I’m Jim Hatcher, a 58-year old travel and adventure blogger. I live in the beautiful state of New Hampshire together with family. My wife Emily (51 years old), my daughter Catherine (32 years old) and my son Martin (27 years old) are my bestfriends, my confidantes and the “other versions” of me. They are literally almost like me. I have a website called TrekSeek.com wherein I share all of my travel experiences and my passion about mountain trekking.
I work as a guide and arrange hiking and trekking tours for people who want explore and have an adventure in the White Mountains, New Hampshire. This mountain range includes the Franconia Range, Sandwich Range, Carter-Moriah Range and Kinsman Range in New Hampshire, and the Mahoosuc Range straddling the border between it and Maine. In all, there are 48 peaks within New Hampshire as well as one (Old Speck Mountain) in Maine over 4,000 feet (1,200 m), known as the Four-thousand footers. With these beautiful ranges, it is a perfect place to trek and discover its beauty. Most of the time, my family helps me organize these treks and they also come with me.
But before my family and I became mountain trek guides, we used to work in different fields. I had a mountain and outdoor adventure shop where people rent and buy gears for their trekking needs. My wife was a public school teacher. My daughter was a financial advisor in New York. My son was a car salesman. Years ago while we were having our Christmas evening dinner, an idea to travel the world as a family came out into the discussion. As we all agreed to do it, we also took the risk of leaving our careers and business to pursue our dream. I sold my outdoor shop to my friend and my family saved money up from their jobs.
The following year, we already found ourselves visiting the 7 continents, 85 countries. What we mostly do is hike and trek the world’s different popular mountain ranges including the Alps, Himalayas, Andes, Ural Mountains, Kunlun, Canadian Rockies, Western Ghats and Tibetan Plateau. This was the time when my daughter brought the idea of sharing our adventure to the world through a blog. When we got back to New Hampshire bringing with us a full load of trekking experience, the tourism officials offered our family to become expert guides to people who want to trek the White Mountains. And since I saw it as a continuation to our family’s adventures, we accepted it and then the rest is history.
With the help of my children, TrekSeek.com came into light. Most of the stuff that I write are trekking-related. My wife and kids occasionally contribute and write about the culture, food and people of a particular place of a particular country that we already visited. And surprisingly, people love our website that each month we get to have hundreds and then thousands of unique visitors. Then not long after, the website became a financial source for us when different companies started to contact us for them to post ads on site’s pages. Some also contact us to sponsor our trips abroad and write about it. It is incredible how technology can get you wherever and whenever you want to be.
As the blog’s traffic grow bigger and bigger, our plan is to expand into drone videography, start our own Youtube channel and feature these videos into our website. In this way, we get to make the website even visually more appealing and attract younger viewers or visitors as well. My son Martin has a great experience when it comes to filming as he once worked as an editor and videographer for a production company in Los Angeles, California.
In general, our aim for the blog is to convince people how amazing it is to travel the world and experience it beyond expectation because there is more to life than just sitting all day working as an employee. Go, travel the world, gain experience from it, influence yourself in a good way, and explore the wonders.