Moments when I feel like I’m still spry are few and fleeting these days. It takes immense self-control not to wag my finger at younger friends and family members who complain about aches and pains and retort, “Just wait till you’re my age.”
So perhaps I should just be grateful to AllTrails rather than gripe about its rating system. Finishing a “Difficult” hike hours ahead of its suggested time and finding it easy or moderately challenging should be a small victory I savor and milk for months.
But I can’t shake how annoying I find the rating system’s unreliability. In talking to dozens of readers, my annoyance only increased when one after another told me they don’t even bother with the ratings as they find them too vague and irrelevant.
For the unfamiliar, AllTrails is the preeminent mobile app for outdoor activities like hiking and mountain biking. (It can also be viewed on a desktop.) It is a treasure trove of maps, photos, and crowd-sourced reviews of trails all around the world. It’s pretty intuitive to use. Many of its functions are free, making it a genuinely valuable and worthy technological addition allowing people to be healthy and experience the natural world. It has a paid version that includes the ability to search for trails based on your current location, downloadable offline maps that very accurately track you on the hike, and even the ability to notify you if you’ve veered off the trail.
Nearly two decades ago, I first started visiting my boyfriend’s family’s place in Colorado. His dad had a book a friend of his had put together that had the names of hikes, a summary, important info about how to access them, and so on. It was one of the most cherished items in that house because it gave us decades of hard-won information and ensured every hike we did was a memorable one. I always wished I could have had that for every destination.
I hadn’t thought about that book for years until writing this newsletter, because that’s what AllTrails became. Sure, its offerings are much better in the U.S. than when abroad, and there are still some things one could nitpick on like more info about parking at trailheads or finding trailheads at less frequented spots. But outdoorsy travelers have access to travel-enhancing information like no generation before.
A recent hike I did from the AllTrails app up Mt. Wrightson
When you are researching hikes, the app includes details about the trail (length, elevation change, etc). It also has reviews by other users who have included helpful tips about conditions, terrain, and photos of the views you can expect to see. There is a user-generated star rating (based out of five) and then AllTrails provides an expected duration and a rating on the difficulty—easy, moderate, and hard.
A big part of preparing for a hike is knowing just how long and difficult it will be—it affects how I pack, mentally prepare, and schedule my day. Yet of the half-dozen or so big hikes I’ve done recently, I found myself finishing hours before the expected duration. Despite the “hard” rating, I would have considered those hikes somewhere between easy and moderate. And I’m not a consistent hiker or in peak physical condition.
I’m not alone. Dozens of readers for my weekly travel newsletter wrote in about AllTrails and were consistent on one theme—they don’t use the difficulty rating at all as they feel it is essentially meaningless.
“Two ‘hard’ hikes turned out to be cakewalks,” complained one, while another said simply, “You have to ignore it. Basically, entirely, generally useless.”
Sorting through what people wrote in turned out to be a repetitive litany.
“The rating is fairly meaningless to me.”
“I almost always find the difficulty easier than what they list it as.”
“Usability is great but difficulty accuracy is hit/miss.”
“I’ve deffo seen things marked as hard and I know that they aren’t”
Instead, what most said to me was that they look at elevation change and photos to assess how much they want to do a trail, and then read comments to find ones that have a similar sensibility and value those.
I reached out to AllTrails this week to see if they had any insight into how they came up with the rating and if they’ve thought about making any changes.
“Our team of trail data integrity specialists determine these ratings using factors that include route length, elevation, community feedback, and specific trail features like obstructions, terrain, and any skills or equipment needed to navigate the terrain,” they said in a statement.
They acknowledged the possibility of variability in user experience, admitting that “a trail that’s easy to one person might be moderate to another” and that the company rates “trails for the broadest audience, while providing additional information so people have the details they need to be prepared.”
But it does seem strange to me to have just three categories when there is such a wide range of hikers, when difficulty affects hike selection, and it also affects how people prepare. It would not seem to be a heavy lift to amend the difficulty ratings to five and better define them. Or adopt a version of the ski trail rating system. But off the seat of my pants something like Beginner, Moderately Easy, Light Workout, Hard, Advanced Hikers. And then make clear how you’re coming up with who fits into what.
For now, though, AllTrails says: “We do not have plans to change the AllTrails rating system but are always open to suggestions. We love hearing from our community on ways we can continue to improve their experiences on the trail.”