To make matters worse, it refers to the “Hanson’s Point Trail”, which is a user trail, but we’ll get to that more in a bit. This trail doesn’t exist and is actually made up of at least half-a-dozen individual trails. Regardless, the 911 dispatcher is told that you’re on the “Red River Gorge Loop Trail”. Suppose you manage to get enough cell signal to make a call to 911, or perhaps you did your due diligence and left a plan with a trusted individual who contacts emergency services on your behalf. Why is this a problem, you ask?Ĭonsider a scenario in which something goes wrong on your hike and you need to rely on search and rescue crews to come help get you out of a jam. Do you know what all of these have in common? They don’t exist!Īll of these are loop hikes that utilize a number of existing trails, but the users that have submitted these hikes have assigned arbitrary names to the hikes, suggesting that these are, in fact, trails maintained by the Forest Service. Just performing a quick search for hikes in the Red River Gorge, I found a whole host of inaccuracies:Ĭonsider the above screenshots of “trails” located in the Red River Gorge. While this provides the company the ability to build a massive database of hikes around the world, it also means that there’s bound to be loads of inaccurate information. Problem #1: Inaccurate Informationīy far one of the biggest issues with AllTrails is that all of the data they provide is crowd-sourced. In this post, I’ll explore the problems with AllTrails and discuss some of the alternatives that are available. While at first glance AllTrails seems to be a benign application that provides a great deal of value to users, there are a number of issues that my fellow admins and I have noticed over the years that have caused us to take a stance against the use of AllTrails in our groups. Over time, I have seen the number of mentions of the app increase on the Facebook groups I help manage ( Kentucky Waterfalls, Arches, and Landscapes). These features have meant that AllTrails has exploded in popularity over the years. AllTrails is a community-driven project that promises to help users discover new hikes and provide them with an easy-to-use interface to allow for tracking hikes and navigating the backcountry with their phones.
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