Labor Day weekend, somewhere in upstate New York, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Brooklyn, where we live. A group of us—my wife, our toddler, and another couple—had rented a beautiful A-frame cottage in the woods. It’s the kind of place that reinvigorates you, and makes you wistfully open a few Zillow tabs. On that morning, we wanted to sneak in an easy hike before lunch, so we fired up AllTrails, the go-to hiking app for outdoors enthusiasts. We wanted a specific set of conditions: a loop, preferably by a body of water, that was easy enough to do with a 2-year-old. After some swiping, we found a 1.4-miler with minimal elevation gain that was just 20 minutes away. One of us downloaded the map and off we went.

The parking lot was surprisingly crowded. We squeezed into a tight spot and walked down to the water, where local kids were skipping rocks in the general vicinity of some ducks. AllTrails instructed us to look for a water tower, where we were to head “downhill back toward the lake” and take the red trail “by the tennis and basketball courts” to find the path. We squinted down into our phones trying to decipher the directions, until one of us had the presence of mind to simply … look up. Aha. There it is.

AllTrails has become the gateway drug which 75 million users around the world use to connect with nature, everyone from urbanites with cushy email jobs to gorpy backpackers embarking on multiday excursions above 7,000 feet along the John Muir Trail. The AllTrails database contains maps of some 450,000 trails from all around the world, indexed by difficulty and accessibility; its users provide reviews, upload photos, and keep one another advised on the latest trail conditions. The app uses a freemium model and has the support of millions of paid subscribers, who pay $36 per year for additional functionality, like the ability to download maps for offline use. In some ways, AllTrails is the rarest kind of app: one that counterintuitively encourages you to look at your phone less.

AllTrails is the brainchild of Russell Cook, an outdoors lover who founded the company in 2010. “I grew up in Florida but traveled around the country with my parents,” Cook, who spent his youth rock climbing and mountain biking, tells me over Zoom. “My mom was a teacher and my dad had his own business, so we’d take off for months over the summer when we were out of school, and I saw basically all 50 states before I was 10.”

After graduating from Duke in 2004 with degrees in computer science and electrical engineering, he moved west to Seattle—heaven for people who appreciate a good air quality index rating. There he met his wife, Lindsay, and they enjoyed the proximity to the outdoors so much that they quickly exhausted many of the excellent hikes that the Pacific Northwest had to offer. “I was like, this is ridiculous,” says Cook. “There are so many amazing places here! Why can’t I find these hidden gems easily?”

That was one component of the AllTrails genesis. The other was calculation: the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. “It was easy to see that GPS over the next five years was going to get so, so good,” says Cook. “Everyone was going to have a Garmin in their pocket.”

The idea behind AllTrails was to use nascent mapping technology to build a collective database and attendant community, and help unlock the outdoors for people who would otherwise not have an entry point. (An early TechCrunch post described AllTrails as “Yelp for people who enjoy the outdoors.”) The company was among the tech incubator AngelPad’s inaugural class of startups, with an initial seed round of just $400,000.

“They have an awesome team that has built a product that could only exist because of the company’s community of millions of passionate users,” says investor Ben Spero of Spectrum Equity. “Over the six years we’ve been working together, it’s remarkable to see how much the platform and company have grown, and we still see so much opportunity as we look ahead.”

As Cook tells it, two very lucky things happened early on that put AllTrails on a path to success. The first stroke of luck involved NASA. In 2011, a few short months after AllTrails’ launch, NASA released its Aster L2 data set and made it publicly available for anyone to use—data that proved crucial to AllTrails’ best-in-class mapping.

“It was lucky timing,” says Cook. “Aster L2 was basically a PDF file of the entire world and the elevations at every single point. So we built a system that was able to ingest that and create our own elevation service, because Google and all the other services weren’t sufficient.”

The second stroke of luck involved the App Store and a Christmas miracle. AllTrails launched its mobile app for iPhone in late 2010 when Cook was living in San Francisco. After the app debuted, he hit the holiday tech party circuit and, in his telling, “forced everyone I saw to download it.”

The hustle paid off in a way he could not have not anticipated. The app had more than a thousand installs on the first day, which shot it to the top of the App Store ranking in its category. And “what I didn’t know is that Apple froze the App Store rankings for the holidays back then between Christmas and New Year’s,” says Cook. “So we ended up jumping to number one in our category and then we were there the whole week while everyone got all their new devices for Christmas. The downloads just went insane. We stayed at number one forever.”

Still, luck gets you only so far. The bigger question is: If you build an app that’s purposefully not addictive, can you still sustain a fast-growing business? AllTrails’ success suggests that just maybe you can.

As our group trudged into the woods, the temperature seemed to drop by 10 degrees. We came across the remains of a snake, still coiled. We got lucky with the rain, but at one point, the trail became a mud pit that we had to circumnavigate with a squirmy toddler who had recently discovered the joys of splashing in puddles.

That’s the tricky thing about trails: They’re living organisms, always changing. The terrain is being reshaped in subtle and not-so-subtle ways daily, by both human feet and the elements.

It’s why, for AllTrails, the community of users leaving feedback for one another is so central to its sustainability. “It’s not about competition—it’s about exploring as a community,” says Ivan Selin, the chief product officer of AllTrails, who came to the company in 2023 after 15 years in lead product roles at Apple, Uber, and Airbnb. “As many times as I’ve shopped on Amazon, I’ve never left a review. But even before joining AllTrails, I felt compelled every time to leave a review myself, because I felt like I leveraged the information from the community.”

Selin joined the team not long after a particularly chaotic period of explosive growth. AllTrails had been growing steadily for years, but then came March 2020. Lockdown.

“It was a wild time,” recalls CEO Ron Schneidermann, who stepped into the top job in 2019, a few years after Cook stepped back from day-to-day operations in the president’s role in 2015. (Cook would go on to co-found the health and wellness platform FitOn in 2018 with his wife, who is a former Fitbit executive.) “I remember looking at our numbers for mid-March through April, and the whole thing just … stopped. All usage of the platform just stopped for about six weeks.”

As the team sheltered in place and migrated all communication over to Zoom and Slack, they collectively had a dawning premonition that people were going to need a way to escape the confines of their homes. “Despite having zero movement in our community or in our numbers, we made a bet-the-company move,” says Schneidermann. “We put all the chips on the table and we said, we believe that this is going to be the ‘summer of hiking.’ That’s what we called it internally.”

As other companies scaled down operations in the early days of Covid, AllTrails ratcheted up. It started emailing its community and marshaling social media campaigns to talk about the virtues of going outside while social distancing. “It was really important that we were the flag bearers for not just this opportunity for physical health, but also for mental health and emotional health,” says Schneidermann.

The bet paid off. Usership during that period grew by triple digits. And the team started to notice funny things about the data. Whereas usership traditionally tended to spike only on the weekends, during the first two years of Covid, they noticed that the spikes had spread throughout the week and people were going on hikes every single day, even on the clock.

“We’d much rather measure success by time outside than time onscreen,” adds Schneidermann. “The hallmark of any really great product is user empathy—understanding the needs of your end users, your community. And I think one superpower we have is that everyone here values time outside. It’s something we interview for.”

One of the defining features of AllTrails is a lack of gamification. For users, it’s anticompetitive. Strava this is not. It isn’t about the difficulty of the hike or how fast you are. “We always also talk about how we are not a fitness app,” says Selin. “And one of the things that we know from our research, what our users appreciate about AllTrails is how we’re not judgmental. We’re accessible to anyone with different levels of familiarity with the outdoors, different demographics.”

Part of that strategy includes building a diverse community of trailheads, people who might have historically been underrepresented in naturalist spaces. Take 25-year-old Diyor Oro, a college student in Maryland who works a full-time job at the post office and started hiking just four years ago. She has maybe 50 documented hikes in the app. What she particularly loves about AllTrails is the discovery; she often goes on four- or five-mile hikes alone and doesn’t like to repeat the same trails, documenting her adventures @PlanetDiyor on Instagram. “For me, hiking just helps me escape and it helps me relieve stress,” she says.

Similarly, Joshua Walker works at Paramount Pictures in Los Angeles and tries to hike at least once a week. (He posts about his adventures @JoshYouTrippin.) He sees in AllTrails an opportunity to help make the hiking world more diverse, and more attractive to people of color, particularly in Black communities. “If you’re looking at the demographic of where most people of color are located, we don’t have the opportunity to just pop out and go camping if we want,” he says. “The more that people see us do that, the more people will feel like it’s OK for them to do it as well.”

At its core, folks love AllTrails because it’s useful technology that backgrounds itself, making life a little rosier and more tolerable, like incandescent lighting, public transportation, disposable contact lenses, or a Brian Eno record. “Part of what we are being very intentional about is using technology to help people disconnect from technology,” adds Selin.

Back on that muddy trail in upstate New York, in fact, we barely used the app for the remainder of our child-friendly loop. As we tiptoed around the mud, the grownups were slightly hungry, the toddler somewhere between indifferent and grouchy. That’s when we stumbled upon the highlight of the hike: a small window in the tree cover that opened to a majestic wide-angle view of the lake. We never would have found it entirely on our own, and on another day in another season it might not have been as exquisite. But on that day in that place, it was the kind of payoff that makes for awful iPhone photos—but perfectly lovely memories.