Hiking trails

Hiking trails. Concepts and definitions.

A trail is a narrow path, usually located in rural areas or natural regions, primarily for pedestrian and livestock traffic. When this traffic is higher, they tend to become wider and turn into sidewalks. They allow passing through these regions and sometimes connect small towns and villages to each other or to points of livestock, agricultural or scenic interest.

These paths are usually not signposted and are not paved or prepared for vehicle traffic, and are mainly travelled on foot, by bicycle, motorbike or on horseback.

A hiking route is a route, to be done on foot, that runs mainly along these types of paths, which can be made up of trails, footpaths, paths, cattle tracks, royal paths, royal roads, firebreaks..., with hiking being the leisure practice consisting of walking along paths of these characteristics. Nowadays, it is a growing activity that allows people of all ages and levels to enjoy nature, with a wide variety of routes of varying difficulty and duration.

Follow a hiking route

To follow a hiking route and not get lost along the way, it is advisable to have a map, preferably a topographical one, which shows the different geographical features and on which the route is marked. In addition to instruments for calculating position and orientation, such as a compass, it is advisable to have a map, preferably a topographical one, which shows the different geographical features and on which the route is marked.

Digital topographic maps are now available for use on dedicated GPS devices or mobile phones which, together with GPS satellite positioning systems, allow the position on the map to be obtained and displayed with high accuracy.

There are also specific applications that allow you to load the hiking route and display it on the map so that following it is easy, very visual and intuitive.

Create a hiking route

There are different ways to create a hiking route, although the most common is to generate them automatically as they are done on the ground or by drawing them on a map in an application that later generates the corresponding file. For the former, Oruxmaps is probably the most powerful application, with a large number of configuration and customisation options.

Once the route is created and stored in a standard exchange format, usually GPX, it can be shared with other users.

Hiking trail apps and websites

There are websites specialised in sharing routes on the internet where they can generally be downloaded for free, such as Wikiloc, Strava, Sicami Tracks or AllTrails, among others, although to obtain advanced features such as route analysis, etc., it will almost always be necessary to pay for some kind of subscription. Together they constitute a repository of millions of routes.

As examples of additional functions, which we show here for Sicami Tracks, as they are offered under subscription at no cost, we can have the analysis of the route according to various parameters, such as the slope of the terrain or the altitude:

It is also possible to add waypoints to which comments or clarifications can be associated, and even multimedia elements such as photographs or videos.

It will even be possible to visualise the animated route in three-dimensional 3D.

As well as other functions related to the characteristics of the route such as the estimated duration of the route, indicative level of difficulty,