What HistoricTrails.org is

A historic hike is a walking route through a place that has a story — a downtown, a fort, a park — with numbered stops along the way. At each stop there is something to read about what happened there, and often a question to test whether anyone was listening.

Everything here is free. You do not need an account to walk a hike, and you do not need one to use trail mode on your phone.

Who it is for

The hikes were built with youth groups in mind — Scout troops especially — so they are designed to hold interest for a few hours and to work for a group walking together with one adult reading aloud. They work just as well for a family, or for one person with an afternoon spare.

What a hike gives you

• A route you can follow on a map, or export to your GPS as a GPX file.
• Numbered stops, each with its own history.
• A printable kit (PDF) if you would rather carry paper than a phone. It's ready within a minute of the hike being published — if the page still says it's being prepared, check back shortly. Every page carries the hike's copyright notice and a link back to its page on HistoricTrails.org, the cover credits whoever created and currently maintains the hike, and a QR code on the cover opens the hike's page when you scan it with a phone. Each stop's coordinates come with small "Google Maps" / "Apple Maps" links you can tap to open that spot directly. If the route climbs or drops, the kit includes an elevation chart — distance along the bottom, elevation up the side, and each numbered stop marked on the line — with the line lightly smoothed so GPS noise doesn't look like a hill; the gain and loss totals next to it are the real, unsmoothed numbers. Every distance and elevation in the kit is printed in both units, like "5.0 mi (8.0 km)". Distances lead with the unit the hike's country uses for distances, and elevations with the unit it uses for heights, following the Unicode Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR), the standard record of each country's conventions: miles and feet first in the United States and the United Kingdom, kilometers and meters first everywhere else.
• A challenge quiz, optional, mostly aimed at keeping younger walkers paying attention.
• A souvenir, on some hikes — a patch, sticker, or similar memento available through an outside store. Not every hike has one, and HistoricTrails.org doesn't sell or ship it; the card on the hike page just points you to where to buy it.

Who writes them

Anyone with an account can build a hike, and the people who build them look after them over time. Some hikes are built with local historical societies or museums and credited to the organization, with the person who posted the hike named on its Credits tab. See Maintaining a hike for what that responsibility means.