Back to Support / Getting started
Filters, distances, and reading a hike page before you commit a Saturday.
The hikes directory lists every published hike. You can filter by country, state/province and city — each narrows the next, so picking a country only offers the states it actually has hikes in — plus difficulty, distance, time and tags, or search by name. If every hike so far is in one country, the country filter stays out of the way rather than asking you to pick the only option.
Every state and city with a published hike has a page of its own, such as
/hikes/us/fl for a state or /hikes/us/fl/tampa for a city. It lists the
hikes there, says how many there are, and a state's page links to its cities.
The Cities list at the bottom of the home page and the hikes directory
links to the city pages, and the place under a hike's title links to the hike's
city page. A state or city appears as soon as one of its hikes is published and
goes away when none are left, since the pages only show published hikes. A hike
that has been moved in the builder shows up under its new place after you
publish it.
Hikes are listed highest rated first. The Sort buttons at the top of the directory switch to newest first, most completed, or nearest you (which asks your device for its location).
Place names (and the populations behind "narrow to a state" working correctly) come from GeoNames.org, used under the CC BY 4.0 license — see the About page for the full credit.
A hike's time is one total: the walking time, worked out from its distance and hills, plus the time its creator suggests at each stop. Cards round it up to the whole hour, like "5 hrs", and the hike's page shows the split between walking and stops. The Time filter sorts hikes into Short, Half day, Full day or Multi-day by that total, and a hike longer than one 7-hour hiking day says how many days to plan for, like "14 hrs · plan 2 days" (on its card, "14 hrs · 2 days"). The easy, moderate or strenuous rating is about the hills only, so a long flat walk is easy but takes a while. See Time and difficulty for exactly how.
Most hikes are loops, finishing back where they began, so cards and the top of each hike's page only call out a hike that is One way, finishing somewhere else. On a loop the walk back is part of the distance and time. On a one-way hike they stop at the finish, and the hike's page says where it ends and, when its creator added it, how to get back. To see only loops, use the Loop tag.
The site tags each hike on its own, from what the hike's page shows the public. Nobody picks them, and they change only when a new version of the hike is published. A hike's tags are listed near the top of its page; tap one to see every hike with that tag.
In the hikes directory, the row of tags under the filters narrows the list. 5-miler comes first, for a quick pick. Choose more than one and you see only hikes with every tag you chose. Tags work together with the place, difficulty, distance and time filters, and Clear all filters starts over.
Distance is not always a single number, because a hike is not always a single uniform walk.
With kilometers selected (the mi/km switch in the footer), the same distances show in kilometers, like "6.9–8.2 kilometers", and elevations in meters. The distance filter then offers under 5 km, 5–10 km and over 10 km instead of the mile ranges: under 3, 3–5, 5–7, 7–9 and over 9 miles. A hike falls in the range of the distance its card shows, so one shown as 5.0 miles is in 5–7.
When we have elevation data for a route, the Overview tab shows an elevation chart between the hike's write-up and its stop-by-stop list. Distance along the route runs along the bottom in miles — every half mile on a short hike under 3 miles, every mile on most hikes, and every 2 miles on a long one over 10 miles — and elevation runs up the side in feet. The line is lightly smoothed so small bumps in the underlying map data don't look like hills, and a nearly flat route stays flat on the chart instead of being stretched to fill it. The climb and descent totals next to the title are calculated separately and aren't affected by the smoothing. Each numbered stop that falls on the route shows as a dot on the line — hover or tap one to see its name. When two or more stops fall close enough together that their dots would overlap, they share one marker labeled with their numbers (like "8, 9" or a range like "1–3") — tap or hover it to see every stop it stands for. The same chart, with the same numbered dots and merged markers, appears in the printable kit.
With kilometers selected, the chart's distance runs in kilometers, marked every half kilometer under 5 km, every kilometer up to 16 km, and every 2 km beyond, and elevation runs up the side in meters. The printable kit's chart doesn't follow the switch: it is drawn in the units the hike's country uses for distances, miles and feet in the United States, the United Kingdom and the other countries that measure distances in miles, and kilometers and meters everywhere else.
The chart's distance axis always covers the full route, including any ridden or optional miles — on a hike where those apply, a line under the chart spells out how much of the axis is ridden or optional, since that can run past the walking distance given at the top of the page.
Under the title, a small Last updated line gives the date the hike's published content last changed, which is the date of its most recent publish. Staged edits in the builder don't change it until they are published.
Each hike has several views. The address bar updates as you switch between them, so you can copy it to share the exact view someone else is looking at; the Share button next to the title always gives out a short link to the hike itself, which is easier to read out loud or write down:
Check the Plan your hike tab. It tells you where to park, whether anything along the route has opening hours or an admission fee, and whether the hike needs money for a streetcar or ferry.