Something to Hoot About: VERY COOL Website

It is hard to believe that it is secretly an ad!

I am sure you know of Nature Valley, it’s a pretty famous brand of granola bars.  Well, I just stumbled upon an ad for their website Nature Valley Trail View.  It is so amazing!  Picture Google’s Street View, but HIKING TRAILS!  You can choose from three of America’s greatest parks – Yellowstone, Smoky Mountains, and the Grand Canyon.  Within each of these parks are several trails that you can learn more about, view the elevation, and virtually hike the entire trail.  For someone who lives far from these places like me, it is great to have a way to go there virtually.

So let’s take a little tour of Yellowstone, shall we?

 

Here is the screen that welcomes you the to National Park of your choice.  Very cool to see the whole park laid out like this.

Each park includes a map that you can zoom in or out on, and highlights the trails and landmarks in the area. 

Once you choose a trail, you are brought to a Street View like image, and you can “walk” along the trail, or opt to play the walk on autoplay with various speeds. 

Very cool, since I live in the Northeast, it is very hard to access any of these places.  It would be fun to look up the Grand Canyon trails, since most of what I see about the canyon is almost always the same view.