We made this website for you.
But—and this is crucial—we also made it for us.
Everyone involved with Backpacking Routes has pounded dirt on Triple Crown Trails (the AT, the CDT, and the PCT). We are outdoor journalists and outdoor athletes, and we love a good thru-hike as much as anyone. We also enjoy a two-or-three-day escape into the woods to clear the head.
But there’s a middle path.
If you have the long-distance backpacking bug, it’s easy to focus on the big trails. But it turns out there are a ton of wonderful, shorter long-distance trails scattered around our vast country.
Hikes longer than two days and shorter than 2,000+ miles. Hikes that don’t require you to quit your job or take out a second mortgage on your house, but that still get you into the wild long enough to experience some physiological benefit.
But here’s the problem. It can be hard to find a middle-distance trail that fits your needs. Let’s say you live in the Southeast, have two weeks to do a hike in mid-September, and are in moderately good shape. How do you find a decent option?
Right now, you have to Google “long-distance trails in the Southeast,” weed out all the Appalachian Trail search results, and spend hours and hours sorting through a complicated tangle of information that remains, hoping to find the metrics that match your needs. And some of the data is contradictory. And most of it out of date. And how do you know you can trust these people?
These are the problems we kept running into, and that’s why we made this website for you (but mostly for us).
We wanted a website where you could search long-distance backpacking trails by region, difficulty, length, and time required to complete. We wanted a website created by experts with trail dust ground into their toes. We wanted a website with trustworthy information, vetted by folks who’ve hiked the trails in question.
But most of all, we wanted to make it easier for us you to get outside and explore some new trails. There’s so much out there to see and experience. And we believe that the more people who live a life connected to the outdoors, the better off we’ll all be.
So welcome to Backpacking Routes. We’re adding new routes all the time, though probably a little more slowly than you’d want us to because we are committed to only adding a route once we have firsthand experience of it–preferably by more than one of us. Want to write for us? Find out how here.
We’d also love your input. Got a route you’d love to see on the site? Drop us a line. And don’t forget to submit a trip report once you’ve accomplished a route on BPR–that way, we other folks can benefit from your firsthand experience and recent trail data.
Thanks for stopping by, and Happy Trails.
Andrew, Jeff, and Maggie