Hiking trails in the United States
12,532 trails catalogued across 50 states · 1,055 with detail pages
Our hiking-trail index combines two sources: a hand-curated set of America's 11 National Scenic Trails plus 26 well-known regional long-distance trails (Appalachian Trail, Pacific Crest Trail, John Muir Trail, Long Trail, Colorado Trail, Tahoe Rim, Wonderland, etc.), and an OpenStreetMap-spined set of 12,495 additional named hiking routes contributed by the OSM community across all 50 states. We render destination pages for 1,055 trails that pass our content threshold (curated, or 10+ mi length, or national/regional network designation, or has a Wikipedia article).
Coverage skews toward the contributor density of OpenStreetMap rather than the actual distribution of U.S. hiking — Connecticut and New York lead per-capita because of active OSM mapping communities, while Wyoming has only 71 named routes despite being prime hiking territory. Reality check: this is a directory of named hiking routes from public records, not a comprehensive list of every trail.
Always verify trail conditions, permits, and water sources with the maintaining organisation before heading out. Long-distance trails frequently require permits for through-hiking and backcountry camping; mountain trails are often impassable for half the year due to snow.
America's 11 National Scenic Trails
National Scenic Trails are designated by federal law (the National Trails System Act of 1968 and amendments). Sorted by length.
| Trail | Length | States |
|---|---|---|
| North Country National Scenic Trail | 4,800 mi | ND, MN, WI, MI, OH, PA, NY, VT |
| Continental Divide National Scenic Trail | 3,100 mi | NM, CO, WY, ID, MT |
| Pacific Crest Trail | 2,650 mi | CA, OR, WA |
| Appalachian Trail | 2,197 mi | GA, NC, TN, VA, WV, MD, PA, NJ, NY, CT, MA, VT, NH, ME |
| Florida National Scenic Trail | 1,500 mi | FL |
| Ice Age National Scenic Trail | 1,200 mi | WI |
| Pacific Northwest National Scenic Trail | 1,200 mi | MT, ID, WA |
| Arizona National Scenic Trail | 800 mi | AZ |
| Potomac Heritage National Scenic Trail | 710 mi | DC, MD, PA, VA, WV |
| Natchez Trace National Scenic Trail | 444 mi | MS, AL, TN |
| New England National Scenic Trail | 215 mi | CT, MA, NH |
Browse by state
Multi-state trails (PCT, AT, CDT, etc.) appear under every state they pass through.
Top cities for hiking trips
Cities with the most hiking trails reachable within a 75-mile drive of the metro.
Seattle
Trails reachable from Seattle (centroid within 75 mi).
New York
Trails reachable from New York (centroid within 75 mi).
Hartford
Trails reachable from Hartford (centroid within 75 mi).
Bridgeport
Trails reachable from Bridgeport (centroid within 75 mi).
Albuquerque
Trails reachable from Albuquerque (centroid within 75 mi).
Washington
Trails reachable from Washington (centroid within 75 mi).
Burlington
Trails reachable from Burlington (centroid within 75 mi).
New Haven
Trails reachable from New Haven (centroid within 75 mi).
What's in a RoamFound hiking page
Each trail page shows length (where recorded), network type (international/national/regional/local), maintaining organisation, terminus points (start/end or loop length), centroid coordinates, and the closest documented metro for trip planning. Curated National Scenic Trails carry hand-written descriptions and direct links to the trail association; OSM-spined trails fall back to whatever the OSM contributors recorded.
We do not currently surface elevation profile, surface type, or per-mile difficulty — OSM data is too sparse on those dimensions for reliable reporting. NPS API integration (queued for v0.9) will fill these in for trails inside National Parks.
Coming next
Next enrichment passes:
- NPS Trails API — clean trail data for every trail inside a National Park, with length and difficulty.
- U.S. Forest Service trails — the National Forest System has tens of thousands of named trails not yet in our index.
- Length computation from OSM geometry — for the ~89% of OSM trails missing the `distance` tag, we'll compute length from the relation's member-way geometries.
- Wikipedia photo enrichment — live now for the famous trails, expanding to anything with a `wikipedia` tag in OSM.