Close your eyes and imagine a stereotypical hiker. Do the words “rugged” and “built Ford tough” come to mind? Are they wearing khaki shorts? Is a tube attached to a CamelBak hanging from their mouth?
Whatever you imagined, that hiker is probably using the app AllTrails. In fact, just about everyone is. Even people who don’t know what a CamelBak is or who have no idea what the term “out-and-back” means. In the world of AllTrails, a hiker of any skill level is still a hiker.
Many of them find the app in the same way.
“Just through Googling, how to get into hiking, AllTrails would just come up a lot,” said Jessica Wood, who co-owns French Custard, an ice cream shop in Kansas City, Mo. “It’s a free app, so we were like, ‘We’ll download it and see what happens.’ We never deleted it.”
This is, of course, by design. What began in 2010 as an idea backed by a seed accelerator — Silicon Valley speak for an incubator program — quickly became a juggernaut that gobbled up many of its competitors. Three years later, AllTrails had raised nearly $4.5 million in funding. In 2018, previous funding rounds were eclipsed when the company raised $75 million.
Like so many pandemic-proof businesses, though, the app, which has details on hundreds of thousands of hiking trails all around the world, saw its star truly rise in the wake of Covid.
“Even prepandemic, we were still seeing really high rates of growth,” said Ron Schneidermann, who took over as chief executive of AllTrails in 2019. (The company’s founder, Russell Cook, departed in 2018.) “But during 2020, we suddenly saw triple-digit growth when there were lockdowns. There was nothing else to do.”
Ms. Wood, who described herself as “a brand-new hiker who had zero experience,” used AllTrails “almost every single day” in the summer of 2022 while she and her husband Alex waited out business permitting headaches.
“It really just made it feel like we had a professional hiker telling us how to hike,” she said, referring to the frequently updated trail reviews other users leave with details about a trail’s condition or whether it’s a safe place to bring animals or children.
“I would say my toxic trait is that I am a very avid reader of the reviews,” said Eva Jee, a food writer and restaurant professional in Denver. “If I’m planning a big hike, especially if it’s one where we’re going overnight in an area that I don’t know or a trail that I haven’t hiked before, I’ll scroll down, and I’ll read the last couple of weeks of trail reports.”
Ms. Jee, 41, says she will often use these reviews to determine what shoes to wear, whether a trail is well-shaded enough to forgo a hat, and what time of year is best to see the aspen trees change color or to take in the wildflower blooms.
“You can glean so much information,” she said.
Gabby Rumney, a 28-year-old project coordinator for the National Grocers Association Foundation in Philadelphia, said she turned to the app before and after hiking all 2,193.1 miles of the Appalachian Trail in 2021. (“That 0.1 really counts,” she added.)
“It was a good introduction to understanding trails and reading maps and understanding difference in terrain,” Ms. Rumney said.
And though she prefers the app FarOut for more challenging through-hikes like the Appalachian Trail or the Pacific Crest Trail, she said AllTrails is far more accessible to a wider range of hikers.
“I think with hiking there’s often this connotation that, ‘Oh, you have to be physically fit and have all this expensive gear,’” Ms. Rumney said. “Part of that is true because it makes things easier. But at the same time, you’re walking, and unless you have a disability that should be accessible to us all.”
At AllTrails corporate headquarters in San Francisco, the word “accessibility” comes up often. “A lot of people were coming to us or were interested in the outdoors, but they didn’t think of themselves as an outdoorsy person,” said Carly Smith, who joined the company in 2021 as its chief marketing officer.
