Thanks for your input, OregonMouse! Let me explain why I decided to post here:

We are also in the process of gathering journals that were published online. However, it is not always possible to determine when they were written. Some people will write as they go and then upload when they can, while others write up their experiences from the last few days once they get a chance to upload, or write afterwards. This is often not made explicit in the text. I hope to get around that issue by contacting people directly, as I am doing now, and getting confirmation from them that what they are submitting was written as they went along. I might also reach people who did not want to publish their private journal online, but who would be ok with sharing it for this project. At least that's my rationale for posting here.

I'm not limiting the scope of this project to long distance trails necessarily. I welcome submissions from anyone, even if they experienced little to no isolation. I just want to get a good picture of people's thoughts and feelings during a hike. Since my focus is on social isolation, I picked the group that I thought would be most likely to experience some degree of isolation, or at least a lot of variation in the amount of social interactions. Do you have suggestions for other groups that might have more experiences like that?

The beauty of our analysis techniques is that we can actually control for length and level of detail, so journal entries of any length can help!