ON FOOT- Simi Valley resident Jim Zuber is the founder of the largest free hiking-related site on the Internet. According to Zuber, "You can spend 10 years hiking in Southern California and never hike the same trail twice." Simi Valley resident Jim Zuber gets a quarter of a million visitors every single month. Zuber is the founder of localhikes.com, the largest free hiking-related site on the Internet.

Five years ago Zuber hiked more than 100 trails in Southern California. He then took his passion for hiking to the next level, the World Wide Web.

Zuber started localhikes.com as a labor of love.

"Hiking is one of the things I enjoy most in the world," he said. He designed his website so people could spend their time hiking, instead of researching trails all day long.

"We're all very busy. We have very little free time. When we decide to go out on a hike on the weekend, we don't want to waste our time researching the hike and wasting daylight," Zuber said.

The website currently has more than 2,000 nationwide hikes listed, of which 300 are in Southern California.

"You can spend 10 years hiking in Southern California and never hike the same trail twice," Zuber said.

After typing in the web address, visitors can enter a ZIP code to get a list of every local trail available. Keywords can also be used to search the hiking site. For example, by typing "waterfalls" into a search engine, a list of hiking trails near waterfalls appears.

After the desired hike location is found, a detailed synopsis of the hike itself is given, including directions to the trail head, a topographic map of the trail, an elevation profile, photographs of the actual hike itself and reviews from other hikers.

There's even a section that tells hikers if they can bring dogs and horses to the trail.

Zuber also offers links to hiking guidebooks. Although readers often use only his site to plan their hikes, he says that it doesn't take the place of a good guidebook, but that it's an ex

is labor of love cellent supplement.

He considers localhikes.com the Amazon.com of hiking websites.

"When you want to buy a book, you read the review online. If you want to know what a hike is like, you go to my site," he said.

Zuber has hundreds of volunteers all around the country who post their hikes on the site, thanks in large part to donated software from National Geo- graphic. The software allows people to put maps on the sites. National Geographic also lists Zuber's hikes on its website exchange.

Zuber's website is so popular that over the three-day Memorial Day weekend he received 150 reviews of hikes people took.

Zuber's able to keep his website free because of the tremendous Web traffic he generates and by selling ads on his site. "Our goal is to make sure the basic hiking information on the Internet remains free," he said.

The future of localhikes.com is bright, Zuber said, especially since the number of visitors is doubling every year. And in development are new features that will allow any visitor to instantly add own pictures and videos of hikes they've taken. In the meantime, Zuber is content to manage the site and take his Cub Scout troop on local hikes-hikes that he documented on the world's busiest free hiking site, a site born in Simi Valley.