Written by Judy Heinrich; Photos submitted

Website links riders with camps and trails

Find a need and fill it” is great advice for anyone looking to start a business. And it’s sometimes an irresistible inspiration even if starting a business is the furthest thing from your mind. Such was the case for Columbus resident John Thurow, creator and proprietor of HorseTrailDirectory.com.

This story began in July 1999 When John and his wife, Joanne, went on a horse-packing trip in Yellowstone Park. Neither had any ties to horses at that time but thought the experience sounded like fun. It was more than fun; it changed their lives.

A few months after Yellowstone, Joanne arranged a trail ride with some friends for John’s birthday. The friends kept several horses they bought, trained and occasionally sold. At the end of the day, Joanne asked John which of the horses he’d like to have. It turns out his birthday present wasn’t just the ride; she was going to buy him a horse.

“I said I liked a certain little spotted one,” John recalls. “But Joanne immediately said, ‘You can’t have that one, that one’s going to be mine.’ So the joke is that we got into horses because, for my birthday, Joanne bought herself a horse.”

They soon found a horse for John, too, and became active in trail riding clubs near their home outside Columbus, Ohio. Initially they boarded their horses because they lived in the suburbs. But it wasn’t long before they decided they’d like to have them at home so they could care for them and work with them more regularly. In early 2000 Joanne found a house on a road that dead-ended into a state forest with 50 miles of trails. Trail rider heaven.

When John retired at the end of 2000, the couple bought a motor home that could pull their horse trailer and began traveling to different places to ride. And that’s when John discovered there was no convenient resource for finding trail riding and horse-camping facilities around the country.

Filling the Need

John’s background was in sales and marketing but his whole career had been related to the computer industry, including business-to-business electronic data interchange and end-user tools for database manipulation. So while he hadn’t created computer programs himself, he was familiar with how they worked and how websites were built. He decided to create an information bank that trail riders could access for information.

“On the one website that existed at the time, the owner would just post in text form. As a user, that got old in a hurry so I wanted to avoid that,” John said. “And because I had just retired and wanted to travel, my other priority was to figure out how to do this without having to do any work!”

The answer was to create a site that allowed users to post their own information about campgrounds and trails they had visited.

To establish some presence online, John did create and post all the content for the first 50 or so campgrounds he listed, based on his own visits. He built in a couple of safeguards, like blocking obscene language and disallowing links to websites other than the campgrounds (to prevent links to ads, scams, pornography, etc.)

HorseTrailDirectory.com went live in 2000. Then in 2001 John opened the site to let its users post information and photos for horse-trail campgrounds they had visited. The formula was a hit: “People really liked contributing and sharing their experiences. That’s why our tagline is ‘Trailriders helping trailriders find new places to ride and camp,’” John says. “Then the campground owners realized that it was a way to promote their places and they really got into it.”

Based on a suggestion from a user, John introduced a review capability in 2002. His five-star rating system now recognizes a winning campground each year based on its having received the highest number of five-star reviews.

HorseTrailDirectory.com features information and reviews for almost 1,300 horse-trail campgrounds and has been recognized as the largest and most used website of its type. The site gets 80,000-90,000 unique visitors each year and between 650,000-750,000 page views, according to Google Analytics.

John’s business model is that the site is free to users, with all revenue coming from two other sources. The first is an ad program that campground owners use to describe their facilities and promote upcoming events. The second is from Google ads that pop up on the website’s pages.

While John hasn’t actually achieved his goal of “not having to do any work,” the time he now spends on HorseTrailDirectory.com is “from time to time doing different things, usually getting a new idea and spending some time working on that.”

Which leaves him plenty of time to spend with Joanne on the trails here in Polk County, which they chose for relocation in 2006 because of our extensive trail systems and mild weather. Joanne now has a Paso Fino and a Tennessee Walking Horse and John has a Quarter Horse that doubles as his Cowboy Mounted Shooting partner. John is a longtime member and board member of S.C. Mounted Shooters, which occasionally has competitions, practices and beginner clinics at FENCE.

And of course, just like their website users, the Thurows like nothing better than finding and exploring new trails in different parts of the country.

“I particularly like finding new places and riding up in the mountains, especially where you’ve got mountain streams running alongside the trail,” John says. “We can go places on horseback that we never would get to on foot, especially in the backcountry. It gives you an experience you really can’t have any other way.”

To take your own trailriding to new locations, you can research horse trails and campgrounds around the U.S. and beyond on horsetraildirectory.com.
And if you want to check out mounted shooting, too, go to scmountedshooters.com. •