Times change, but the Appalachian Trail always stays the same … or does it? For hikers, the white blazes can feel like the one constant in an unpredictable world, a safe haven we can return to again and again when the chaos of life feels like too much.
“The trail will always be there,” we assure each other whenever one of us has to cancel a planned hike or get off trail earlier than expected. Whether it’s in one year or ten, we take for granted that the AT will be waiting for us, dynamic yet unchanging, whenever we’re ready to return to it.
Yet while the spirit of the AT endures across the years, the reality of life on the trail has changed quite a bit over time. A lot has shifted in the last decade alone, from gear and technology to trail culture. Here are some of the most noteworthy changes since 2015.
1. Hikers Are More Connected Than Ever
Hikers had already widely adopted smartphones for music, navigation, photography, etc. on trail by 2015. But until recently, their use in the backcountry was somewhat limited by the availability of cell service.
Contrast that with today, when the expansion of satellite networks for everything from SOS to regular text messaging is changing the game. Tech companies have already rolled out SOS and non-emergency direct messaging capabilities that function on satellite networks even without cell signal. Meanwhile, some newer backcountry GPS devices even allow users to send each other voice memos and photos via satellite.
It’s one thing to have a phone with you for pictures and navigation when hiking, and quite another to have full connectivity to the outside world throughout the hike. Going to the mountains has long been a means of escaping the modern world for many of us, so while the increase in connectivity may come with improvements in hiker safety and convenience, it also threatens to change the nature of the backcountry in ways that not everyone will welcome.
2. From AWOL to Guthook to Farout
2015 happens to be the year the first FarOut Appalachian Trail Guide was released — although the app was called Guthook back then). Guthook was very much a novelty back in those days. Most hikers were carrying printed pages from AWOL’s Appalachian Trail guide as their primary form of navigation (or possibly the Appalachian Trail Data Book if you were a total dweeb).
While AWOL remains popular to this day, Guthook — rebranded to FarOut in 2021 — has become a staple for today’s hikers. The app’s GPS integration, interactive features, and detailed, crowdsourced commentary on many waypoints make it way too useful to ignore.
Navigating primarily by following your GPS arrow along an overlaid AT redline is a different experience than using an analog guidebook — and it’s dramatically different from using a physical map and compass.
On the one hand, today’s hikers have more detailed, up-to-date information about their immediate surroundings than ever before. On the other hand, we do miss out on a lot of geographic and cultural context by relying on the app.
3. We’re all wearing SNEAKERS now???
Non-hikers are still comically taken aback when they see the shoes I wear for a long hike. Yet the footwear landscape has been shifting for 10 years at least, with more and more hikers moving away from sturdy, high-ankle boots and into lightweight, quick-drying trail runners.
We’ve been asking AT hikers about their footwear preferences since 2014. Even then, slightly more than half of hikers were choosing trail runners over boots. However, most hikers were still starting the trail in boots back then and switching to trail runners along the way. And throughout the trail, the relative share of boot wearers was overall a lot higher among hikers of yesteryear.
Even those wearing trail runners tended to gravitate toward sturdier options like the Salomon XA Pro 3D rather than the sleeker, lighter models favored today.
In contrast, by 2024, a staggering 80% of hikers in our survey started the trail in trail runners, and a full 86% favored that type of shoe throughout the hike. Brands like Hoka, Topo, and Altra, which were all but unheard of in 2014, have come to dominate the rankings year after year.
4. The Rise of the UL Backpacking Quilt
Here’s another trend that probably won’t surprise anyone who’s been following the UL backpacking scene the last few years.
Back when we started asking AT thru-hikers about their sleeping bag preferences in 2014, quilts weren’t big yet. Quilt brands like Enlightened Equipment and Katabatic, which now dominate the sleeping bag market (at least in our surveys) were only used by about 4% of hikers apiece.
In 2015, the first year we specifically asked about quilt use, just 15% of hikers reported using one. By 2024, that number had climbed to 53%, and Enlightened Equipment was favored by more respondents than the following six brands combined.
Lacking zippers, hoods, and the entire back section of a traditional sleeping bag, quilts are both lighter and less constricting. They’re not suited for every trail or every hiker — some find them too drafty, even with a warmer temperature rating — but the overwhelming number of thru-hikers using them these days suggests that they’re more than just a passing fad.
5. Most Hikers Still Used Foam Sleeping Pads 10 Years Ago
I know, it’s hard for me to imagine too. Yet when I think back to my earliest backpacking trips, I remember lashing a bulky (and already ancient) Therm-a-Rest pad to the bottom of my pack without thinking twice about it. It’s just what everyone did back then. The concept of an inflatable sleeping pad seemed frivolous and a bit reckless to me.
I was a bit of a snob about this and insisted that I would always keep to the old, foamy ways — until halfway through the AT, when I was forced to acknowledge that while inflatables are expensive, they deliver far more warmth and comfort for a similar weight penalty (and take up a billion percent less space).
The quality of my sleep improved a lot when I finally caved and bought my first lime-green Big Agnes Q-Core, and my life on the trail got a lot more comfortable. I also discovered other fine qualities of my pad, especially the fact that I could use it as a makeshift raft to float around on lakes.
That pad lasted the rest of my thru-hike and beyond, convincing me that inflatables could last long enough to be cost-effective if properly cared for.
For additional context: 83% of thru-hikers in our 2014 survey used foam pads, compared to just 13% last year. Inflatables have well and truly taken over. Wow.
6. Hammocks Got Way Less Popular
While tents have gotten much lighter over the past 10 years, thanks largely to innovative new materials and non-freestanding designs, hammocks haven’t kept pace. One reason is that DCF, the revolutionary UL material that has slashed tent weights (while ballooning their prices) in recent times, evidently isn’t so suitable for use in hammocks, although DCF hammock tarps have gained traction.
With its abundance of trees, the AT is the best-suited to hammocking of all the Triple Crown trails — yet in our surveys, hammock use dropped from 17% of hikers in 2014 to just 5% in 2024.
I favored a hammock for the first half of my thru-hike in 2018, but I ended up in a tent and found that ground-based shelters are more livable in the long run. Hammocks are great for sleeping, but forget about doing your morning stretches, changing clothes, or hanging out reading a book on an early afternoon in camp.
7. Chemical Water Treatments Used To Be More Common
We first began asking about hikers’ water treatment of choice back in 2016. Mid-sized filters were already the predominant choice back then, and they’ve only grown in popularity since. 65% of 2016 hikers used a mid-sized filter such as the Sawyer Squeeze compared to a stunning 92% last year.
Other water purification methods have waned in kind, most notably chemical treatment methods like Aqua Mira drops. 14% of hikers used such treatments in 2016, while less than 1% said they used them in 2024.
This makes sense in my head: chemical treatments used to be the UL purification method of choice, but filters are functionally just as effective, only weigh a bit more, remove unpleasant particulate matter in addition to microbes, and produce water that can be safely consumed immediately without requiring a waiting period. I still think chemical treatments have their place as a backup method and for use in freezing conditions when a physical filter could easily be damaged, though.
Miniature filters like the oft-reviled Sawyer Mini have also plummeted in popularity from 10% in 2016 to just 2% in 2024. Thru-hikers have complained that the Mini has a low flow rate and clogs frequently, making the marginal weight savings over the full-size Sawyer harder to justify.
Related: More Hikers Report Filtering All Their Water These Days
Speaking of water, apparently we were all a bunch of risk-taking delinquents back in the olden days. In 2016 only 63% of hikers reported treating their water all the time on the AT, compared to a solid 84% by 2024. 4.8% of 2016 survey participants reported contracting a waterborne disease in 2016 compared to 2.8% in 2024, for what it’s worth — but in reality, we’re only talking about a handful of hikers in our survey getting Giardia or similar each year, so I’m actually not sure those data are worth much.
I do wonder if the higher adoption rate of easy-to-use filters like the Sawyer Squeeze has something to do with the large percentage of hikers filtering all their water in modern times. Chemical treatments are a little more involved and require you to wait 30 minutes or more before drinking, and/or can impart an unpleasant taste, so it’s easy for me to imagine that the 14% of hikers relying on chemical treatments in the days of yore might have been more willing to take liberties with their treatment practices in the interest of convenience.
8. The Trail Is … Not Getting More Crowded?
At least not with additional thru-hikers. Contrary to the popular belief that the trail continues to grow more crowded with each passing year, 2024 saw the lowest number of official 2,000-miler completions recorded by the ATC since 2016, excluding 2020 and 2021, which were dramatically impacted by Covid restrictions.
3,377 hikers reported starting the AT at Springer Mountain and 1,166 hikers reported completing it to the ATC in 2016, compared to 2,956 and 889, respectively, in 2024. It’s possible that ATC is still tabulating 2024 data, so the ‘24 numbers could continue to grow — but ATC Communications Director Ann Simonelli told The Trek last summer that on-the-ground thru-hiker counts were down in 2024 and that the organization anticipated a lower number of thru-hikers overall compared to prior years, and these data appear to support that.
The highest number of northbound starters at Springer Mountain in recent years — over 3,800 — was recorded in 2017, and the numbers haven’t consistently trended up or down since then. This is far from a perfect dataset, as not everyone registers their hike or checks in on the ground with ATC. It also doesn’t reflect how many day hikers and weekend warriors are using the AT. Still, the trends are interesting to see.
9. The AT Business Landscape Has Changed
Change is the only constant on the AT as in life, and this is perhaps nowhere better exemplified than in trail towns.
Operating an AT hiker hostel is a challenging business model. Margins are understandably low when you operate a seasonal business that largely caters to budget-conscious dirtbags (I say this with love, dear reader).
Many hikers dream of someday settling alongside the trail and helping to build the community we all know and love, so new hostels seem to pop up all along the trail every year — yet many of them have to close their doors after a few years or change hands. The challenges of the pandemic years certainly didn’t help.
Top of Georgia Hostel was a major landmark when I thru-hiked in 2018, went out of business in 2019, was bought and rebranded as Hostel Around the Bend in 2020, and was just sold to Stanimal of Stanimal’s 328 Hostel fame this past winter.
Many of the hostels and restaurants I knew in 2018 aren’t there anymore, and there are a lot of new names I wouldn’t have recognized back then.
Some beloved establishments like the Homeplace restaurant in southern Virginia have closed their doors for good in recent years. Yet at the same time, some classic stops along the AT have endured over decades, like Shaw’s Hostel in Maine.
Hostels and other AT business owners are as tough as the hikers they cater to. Uncle Johnny’s and Mountain Harbour hostels in Tennessee have both tenaciously clung on and rebuilt to continue serving Class of 2025 hikers despite weathering a literal hurricane last fall.
10. The Actual Footpath Has Changed a Lil’ Bit
The somewhat outdated “halfway point” of the AT (isn’t the actual halfway point anymore). Photo: Matthew King
The exact length of the AT varies from one year to the next since trail maintainers are constantly working to improve the trail. Minor reroutes, extra switchbacks, etc. might only add (or, in a few cases, subtract) a mile or two year over year, but those changes add up.
The AT was only a mere 2,050 miles long when it was first completed in 1937. In 2025 it’s 2,197 miles long. Even in the last 10 years it’s already grown by 8 miles. Here’s a detailed breakdown of how the total length of the trail in miles has changed since 2015*:
2024: 2197.4 mi
2023: 2,198.4
2022: 2,194.3
2021: 2,193.1
2020: 2,093
2019: 2,192
2018: 2,190.9
2017: 2189.8
2016: 2,189.1
2015: 2,189.2
The official length of the trail in 2025 has not changed since last year, despite the trail sustaining major damage from Hurricane Helene. Officially, it’s still 2,197.4 miles long, although I’m not sure if that’s reflective of real life or if ATC just hasn’t been able to tabulate the official distance for this year amid the hurricane-induced chaos.
*I pieced this together from multiple sources because the info wasn’t always readily available from ATC. If someone has guidebooks from past years and notices discrepancies with the numbers I listed above, can you let me know in the comments? THANK U.
Conclusion
This is, obviously, not an exhaustive list. Time marches on, and the AT has changed in a thousand small ways in the last decade — to say nothing of the full 87 years since it was first completed.
Change can be a good thing, and I would love to say the AT’s essential spirit will endure regardless, but I don’t think it’s good to just assume that. In recent years, we’ve seen major incidents like the pandemic and Hurricane Helene leave their mark.
Looking ahead, the trail faces existential threats from climate change and an administration that appears increasingly hostile to public lands stewardship. Meanwhile, the accelerating pace of technological development will likely continue to shape the AT’s future in ways both good and bad.
I expect that the Appalachian Trail will continue to be a source of wonderment and adventure for thru- and section hikers for many years to come, but let’s not take that too much for granted, eh?
Featured image: Graphic design by Zack Goldmann.
