True. I know I’ve mentioned this before elsewhere, but for me SOTA is a good one. Summits On The Air… an amateur radio scheme where you get points for contacting people from hilltops by radio - a pleasing mixture of geekily technical with the hiking/outdoors thing.
I did a sort of photo dump of a recent one here.
I don’t do enough for it to make a real fitness difference though.
But there was a period of a few months some years back where my only internet access was by mobile phone from half way up a fairly steep hill. (long story). So I would pop up that hill 2-3 times a day. I’m an impatient sort of person so always hurried and arrived well and truly out of breath, then settled down for 30min or so to rely to emails and so on.
I think at the end of those months my cardio-pulmonary fitness was the best it’s ever been. 