Hiking Trails Worldwide: Maps & Route Guides

Hiking Trails Worldwide: Maps & Route Guides is an online directory of hiking trails spanning multiple countries and national parks, including the United States, Switzerland, Netherlands, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Austria, France, Czechia, Poland, Sweden, Hungary, Romania, Slovenia, and the United Kingdom.

The directory allows users to search and browse routes by criteria such as difficulty, distance, elevation gain, and trail type, including categories like waterfall hikes, coastal walks, and dog-friendly routes.

Each trail entry includes mapped routes, recorded elevation, estimated duration, and source links for further reading, with a total of 1,010,469 kilometres mapped across 502 national parks.

The site highlights bucket-list and expert-level long-distance paths alongside shorter trails, supporting comparison and trip planning for hikers.

The directory provides 154k routes across 52 countries, covering 1.6M kilometres of walking, with every route admitted having a real, measured line on the map.

Difficulty combines distance with total ascent into an effort index, then adjusts for gradient, helping compare physical effort within the directory without establishing technical terrain or exposure.

Elevation gain, high and low points, and the profile chart are sampled from open terrain data along the line, not copied from a description, ensuring accuracy for planning.

Route descriptions and filtered guides are generated from the recorded data using templates, and photos from the surrounding area are contextual images from Wikimedia Commons.

The directory is free to use with no account needed, and users can download GPX files and view section-by-section ascent and descent where the stored profile supports it.

The directory highlights that the season field is planning metadata, not a live statement about snow, closures, or trail condition, so users should compare official notices before travelling.

The directory states that the difficulty rating is useful for comparing routes but does not establish technical terrain, exposure, path condition, or the skills required on the day.

The directory provides a support email at [email protected] for corrections and local knowledge, asking users to provide a dated source or their own observation.

The directory includes a 'Trail of the day' feature, such as the Via Francigena - part France - 04 Besançon - frontière, which is a 91.5 km point-to-point route rated expert with 1,817 m of recorded ascent.

The directory includes a 'Hiking knowledge centre' with popular guides like 'Easy Hiking Trails in United States' and 'Family-Friendly Hikes in United States' to help users find relevant content.

The official website of Hiking Trails Worldwide: Maps & Route Guides is hikingtraildirectory.com.