User:Mars hikes/john-zahorian

= John Zahorian = John Zahorian (born May 26, 1989) is an American long-distance hiker, filmmaker, entrepreneur, musician and bike-tourer. Earlier his professional career was in the field of engineering.

Long-distance hiker
Zahorian has thru-hiked the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail and the Appalachian Trail and has therefore achieved tripple crown status.

There in no list of his hikes published anywhere, but he has documented most of his hikes on his Youtube channel. Amongst other hikes he hiked on the Great Divide Trail in Canada, the Arizona trail and the Oregon Coast Trail.

Zahorians hiking style is fast and ultralight. His gear suggestions found a broad audience in the ultralight world and his idea of hiking in thrift-store button shirts was copied by many of his friends and other hikers.

He set an new fastest known time (FKT) on the Colorado Trail using the unsupported method in 2016. This hike was also documented in a dramatic Youtube video.

Zahorian initially used the trail name Carrot, but gave it up, when he hiked the CDT at the same time as Carrot Quinn, in order to avoid confusions.

Filmmaker
Zahorians hiking videos set a new quality benchmark for single-handed (meaning that everything comes from the same person: recording, editing, post-production), long-distance hiking videos on Youtube. His quality is only matched by maybe five other long-distance hikers worldwide, some of them with a professional background and academic training in video editing. The editor of the channel with the most subscribers in the thru-hiker community said, he hopes that he one day will be able to match Zahorians quality.

Usually Zahorian spend weeks, if not months in post production of his videos, which gives them a professional studio look. On Instagram stories of his friends, Zahorian can be observed carrying a gimbal for shake-free recording.

As a side project he produced the routes podcast.

Entrepreneur
In 2016, Zahorian and a friend founded a pack company. They started producing specialized, ultra-light backpacks for their own needs.

The packs were a huge success and every batch they produced, was sold out quickly. They were forced to search additional manufacturing capacities and hope that they can match the demand for their packs in the 2018 hiking season.

Zahorian and his friend used influencer marketing to establish their brand by giving their packs to people with a certain reach in the hiker community. Other specialized long-distance hiking brands were then forced to produce similar packs.

The fastest known time (FKT) on the Appalachian Trail was achieved using a prototype pack from Zahorians company.

Musician
Zahorian produces his own music and has published snippets of it online. He released his own album under the name Cedar Skies in 2017 and has performed his music live. Thanks to his knowledge in music, his videos often have a carefully selected and well matching background music.

Bike-tourer
Prior to his career as a thru-hiker, Zahorian did a couple of bike tours, some of them took several months.

Personal life
Zahorian was born in Dayton, Ohio and lives in Provo, Utah, were also the R&D department of his company is located. One of his sisters is also into hiking.