Every guide on this site carries a name and a date. This page explains who writes them, what qualifies him to write them, and what happens when something turns out to be wrong.
Who writes Explortaion
Explortaion is written and reviewed by Marcus Feld, the site's founding editor and its only author. There is no content farm behind this site and no anonymous contributors: if you disagree with something on a guide page, there is one person to hold responsible for it, and you can reach him directly.
Marcus has spent fourteen years travelling and hiking independently rather than on packaged tours. That has meant long-distance routes through the Alps, trekking in Nepal, multi-week trips through Patagonia and Iceland, and a lot of time in the desert parks of the American Southwest where the nearest town is an hour of dirt road away. The guides on this site come from that experience, not from a brief.
Training and credentials
- Wilderness first aid (WFA) certified — renewed on a two-year cycle, with a specific focus on the altitude, hypothermia and trauma scenarios that come up on the routes covered here.
- 14 years of long-distance hiking and overland travel across Europe, the Himalayas, South America and North America.
- Navigation and route planning — map, compass and GPS-based planning, with the offline and paper fallbacks that every guide on this site repeats.
- Cold-weather and high-altitude planning — the layering, acclimatisation and turnaround-decision material in the winter hiking and altitude guides.
Where a subject sits outside that experience, the guide says so. The cave diving and deep diving articles, for instance, are written deliberately as explanations of risk and of the training required — not as instructions. Nothing on this site is a substitute for a certified instructor, a licensed guide, or your own judgement on the day.
How the guides are researched
Every article follows the same process before it is published:
- Primary sources first. National park services, tourism boards, immigration authorities and met offices are checked directly. Where a guide gives a visa rule, a park fee, a seasonal closure or a permit requirement, it comes from the body that actually issues it, and the guide links to that body rather than to a reseller.
- Cross-checking. Practical details are confirmed in at least two independent places. When two sources disagree — commonly on fees and on shoulder-season access — the guide says that they disagree instead of picking one silently.
- Specification over hype. Gear guides discuss the trade-offs that actually decide a purchase: weight, denier, hydrostatic head, packed volume, lumens, battery chemistry. No invented product names, no made-up test results, no star ratings we cannot justify.
- Safety stated plainly. Anything that can seriously hurt you is described as the risk it is, with the training or certification it requires named up front.
Updates and corrections
Travel information decays. Fees change, trails close, visa rules get rewritten with little warning. Each article carries both a published date and a reviewed date, and the reviewed date is the one that matters: it is the last time the practical details were checked against the sources above.
If you find something out of date, tell us and it gets fixed. Send the page, the claim, and the correct information to [email protected] or use the contact page. Corrections that change practical advice are applied to the article and noted in the reviewed date.
How the site is funded
Explortaion is reader-supported through advertising and, on some gear pages, affiliate links. That funding model comes with two commitments:
- No paid placements. No tourism board, tour operator, hotel or brand can buy a mention, a ranking position or a favourable verdict in a guide.
- Recommendations are not for sale. Where a gear guide recommends a specification, it recommends the specification, not a sponsor. Affiliate links never change what the article says, and the affiliate disclosure appears on every page that carries one.
We do not sell bookings, we do not collect traveller data, and we do not accept sponsored posts. The editorial policy sets out the full standard; the privacy policy covers what happens to your data.
Contact
Corrections, disagreements, and reader trip reports are all welcome, and reader reports are how several guides on this site got better. Write to [email protected]. If your message is about a specific page, including the URL saves a round trip.
For story submissions specifically, the submission page explains what makes a report publishable.
Conclusion
One author, named, with checkable credentials, primary sources cited on every practical claim, and a visible review date on every article. That is the whole editorial model, and it is deliberately a small one — it is easier to keep a small publication honest than a large anonymous one.
