High Desert Institute

Pathfinders’ Guild

Mission

Maintain safe and accessible pathways for off-grid travel, ensuring community members can move freely through the desert landscape as well as the digital landscape between the outposts and other communities.

Future Projects

Trail Building and Maintenance

Create and maintain desert trails for hiking, biking, and emergency travel routes.

Off-Grid Navigation Tools

Develop and deploy navigational tools and apps to help travelers find safe routes through the desert.

Emergency Response Systems

Design systems for emergency response and evacuation routes in case of natural disasters.

Organizing Carpools and Rideshares

Setting up systems to help people plan and coordinate travel plans across the web of permaculture and mutual aid. Learn More

Current Projects in this Guild

  • All Seeing Eye
    A 3D printed structure containing broad spectrum sub-GHz Meshtastic VLBI elements for distributed RF observation.
  • Collaborative Quadrupeds
    Quadruped robots working together using the mesh to solve complex tasks as a team.
  • Cyberpony Express
    A free, encrypted, public mesh network based on Meshtastic. It is designed to be a free, open-source, digital postal service for the people.
  • Cyberpony Express BBS
    The bulletin board software that powers Cyberpony Express, providing resilient store-and-forward messaging across the mesh network.
  • Cyberpony Express BBS
    The bulletin board software that powers Cyberpony Express, providing resilient store-and-forward messaging across the mesh network.
  • Flying Robots
    Low-cost quadcopters, rovers, and solar boats coordinated via the Cyberpony Express mesh to handle logistics, observation, and disaster response.
  • Fox Hunting: Community Policing
    Developing skills and tools for radio direction finding to maintain the integrity of the Cyberpony Express mesh network and locate interference.
  • Hacking Weather Satellite Uplink
    Hacking together spare parts to build an off-grid satellite data uplink for free, local satellite images, weather forecasts, and emergency alerts.
  • Meshtastic-LLM
    A tool for connecting local LLMs to the Meshtastic network.
  • Meshtastic-LLM
    A tool for connecting local LLMs to the Meshtastic network.