I’m an Avid Hiker and AllTrails User. Are the New AI Features Any Good?

Before I pass any actual judgment on whether it’s useful, lukewarm, or the Next Big Bad Thing, I’ll have to actually use it. Optimistically, I’m aiming to make that sometime next month because I’m getting cabin fever. And I don’t even have a cozy cabin, just an apartment.

AllTrails pulled the wraps off its new Peak tier, a paid subscription that adds to (but doesn’t replace) the AllTrails+ paid tier by plugging in a few AI-driven features.

“The launch of Peak includes AI-powered custom trail routes, new predictive weather capabilities, and more,” reads AllTrails’ May 12 announcement.

new features

I can’t claim that Peak’s AI alone is enough to throw off the veneer of a complete escape to nature. You’re using a phone, you’ve got perhaps the free version of AllTrails or AllTrails+ on it, feeding you candy-colored topographic maps and guiding you along trails by way of downloaded routes. You brought the 21st century with you in your pocket.

Peak takes everything included in AllTrails+ and adds a few AI-driven features. These include:

• Custom Routes. You can build new routes from scratch, customize trails that already exist in AllTrails’ massive database, or use the new smart routing system that lets you make trails shorter, less steep, or “more scenic” (where possible), just by tapping the screen.
• Community Heatmap. Here’s a feature that’s got my attention. I like the remote trails, the ones other people avoid. If I see more than four people a day on a trail, I get a bit grumpy. The Community Heatmap shows you nearby trail traffic that’s “supported by millions of trailgoers’ activities.” How they get that data from those hikers, exactly, I’d like to know more about.
• Trail Conditions. AllTrails describes it as functioning as a weather app within the AllTrails platform. It” combines analysis of 15 weather factors with geospatial intelligence and recent reviews” to provide expected trail conditions, such as temperature, precipitation, snow depth, air quality, mosquito density, and more. In the future, AllTrails plans to offer “terrain and ground conditions showing pavement, gravel, mud, and more.”
• Outdoor Lens. AllTrails describes this as a trail encyclopedia in your phone. You can point your smartphone’s camera at a tree, flower, or “more,” whatever AllTrails has in mind when it says more. It launches sometime later this summer and will expand to include more identification features after that.

Peak will start rolling out to “select members in the coming weeks,” and it’ll become available globally after AllTrails releases its 2025 Summer Update in June. If you want to register for early access to Peak (nothing is guaranteed), click here.