The perfect trail is out there

I grew up in a little house perched on the side of a mountain, surrounded by subalpine forest some 2,000 feet below the treeline in Colorado. Out the back door is a trail that leads to the ridge, and if you were intrepid enough, you could spend days following it from one 14,000-foot peak to another. My family is a family of hikers — but the way we each want to experience the outdoors couldn't be more different.

My brother is backcountry-bound nearly every weekend, maps downloaded, always farther than anyone else wants to go. My parents meticulously plan their summits and love to travel to far-flung destinations to spend days on the trail. My husband and I? We like slow meanders with our kids — identifying flowers and fungi, searching for salamanders under every rock. Three generations, three completely different definitions of a perfect day outside.

What we all have in common is AllTrails.

AllTrails is the platform for exploring the outdoors — an app and website connecting a global community of 95 million members to more than 500,000 trails worldwide. Whether you're a first-time walker, a seasoned trail runner, a mountain biker, or a family with little legs and big curiosity, AllTrails meets you exactly where you are. And now, through a partnership between Lonely Planet and AllTrails, getting outside has never been better supported – pairing Lonely Planet's trusted travel expertise with AllTrails' on-the-ground guidance to help explorers feel confident in the outdoors, wherever they are in the world. As part of that partnership, readers can unlock 30% off AllTrails Plus — more on that below.

But first, let me tell you how we got here.

A doorway to waterfall country

When we first moved to Tennessee from Colorado, we had no idea the wealth of outdoor experience this state actually offers. AllTrails was like a doorway into waterfall country. We planned a waterfall trip nearly every weekend that first year – and the trail filters made it effortless. I could search by activity type, difficulty, distance from home and kid-friendliness all at once. We love a waterfall hike. It's hotter here than we were used to, and being able to hike down to the base of a fall, feel the spray, wade in the pool, hunt for salamanders – it helped us acclimate.

Some days we'd wake up and say, we need to spend the whole day in the woods, so we'd filter for something long and challenging. Other days, the kids aren't going to last, so we'd find something shorter with a good swimming hole at the end. The community reviews from fellow AllTrails members made all the difference, real people writing about trail conditions, river levels, how the kids did, what to bring and what to expect at the trailhead. It goes beyond navigation. It helped us build an outdoor lifestyle in a state we were only just beginning to know.

Off the trail, we'd find a small town near the trailhead. Stop for lunch or an ice cream. We took backroads, so we started to get a sense of direction in our new state. AllTrails helped us fall in love with Tennessee. And it continues to shape how we travel now, wherever we go.

The free version: a great place to start

We started, as most people do, with the free Base membership. The trail discovery tools are impressive: you can search and filter by distance, elevation gain, difficulty, trail type, activity, and features like dog-friendly, kid-friendly, or wheelchair-accessible routes. You can read member reviews, browse photos, check recent condition reports and navigate your route in real time, all without spending a penny.

The Base plan is great for casual explorers, people scoping out trails close to home, or anyone dipping a toe into outdoor adventure for the first time. The community is an incredible resource. I love the way members leave photos, conditions updates, and honest reviews that help me know exactly what I'm walking into.

Moving up to plus: essential for traveling families

Because AllTrails had become such an incredible tool for our outdoor life in Tennessee, upgrading to Plus was an easy choice. And it proved itself almost immediately on our first big trip as a Plus family: four days in Denali National Park, Alaska.

We took the train from Fairbanks with a very loose itinerary. Mostly, we just had a sense of adventure and the AllTrails dedicated Denali page downloaded. With Plus, you can save trail maps for offline use, which is essential when you're traveling somewhere that cell service doesn't reach, and that's as true in rural Tennessee as it is in the Alaskan wilderness. We filtered for hikes that suited our family, read member reviews, cross-checked with a park ranger, and settled on the Savage Alpine Trail: a route that climbs from the riverbed to a snowy ridgeline and drops into an alpine meadow. Because of what we'd read on AllTrails, we knew to pack proper layers for the elevation change, and we knew the park bus required car seats for small children — so we picked one up at the visitor center. (A small aside to the bus driver who left it waiting at the pickup spot with my name on it.)

The real test came high on the ridgeline. The wind was blowing, the little one was getting sleepy, and we needed to know how much farther we had to go. With the offline map loaded, we could see exactly where we were — close enough to the descent to keep going, far enough to know what the kids had in them. We reassured ourselves. We reassured them. We told them we might see a moose. We kept walking.

Plus also gives members live activity sharing, which for us, turned out to be the most emotionally valuable feature for my family of travelers. Recently, my parents completed a multi-day trek through England — hiking village to village, staying in inns along the way. From Tennessee, I could track their route in real time and know when they'd reached the next stop. AllTrails made it possible to share their adventure from across the ocean. For any family whose people are scattered across different states and trails, that kind of connection is worth a great deal.

Plus is available at 30% off for Lonely Planet readers — a generous offer for a membership that pays for itself the first time you find yourself out of cell service on a trail with small children and a lot of mountain left to climb.

Peak: for the always on the trail

We upgraded to Peak recently, and it has already changed the way we explore.

The heatmap feature has been a revelation. I'm thinking of a recent trip to the Great Smoky Mountains — the most visited national park in the entire US system, where finding a quiet trail can sometimes feel harder than the hike itself. With AllTrails' community heatmaps, I can see at a glance which trails are seeing heavy traffic and find an alternative just a few miles up the road where the crowds haven't gathered yet. I'm not in the wilderness to do the thing everyone says is great. I'm there to hear the burble of a stream, to be among the trees, to see the view from the top of the mountain. AllTrails helps me achieve that feeling even in the most popular parks in the country.

And then there's Outdoor Lens — the feature I didn't know I needed until I had it. In my ideal other life, I am a naturalist who knows the name of every plant and every insect. In this life, I am not that person. With Outdoor Lens, I can pretend. I snap a photo of a flower, a fungus, a beetle on a log, and within seconds the app identifies it, gives me the common and scientific name, and saves the discovery to my personal logbook with the GPS location and timestamp. It's like keeping a nature scrapbook of every hike — and it has turned my kids from "let's keep walking" into "wait, what is that?" every five minutes, which is exactly the kind of hike I want to be on.

Peak also allows members to build fully custom routes from scratch on mobile — useful for my brother, who is always trying to get somewhere no existing trail quite reaches, and for anyone planning a more complex adventure that doesn't fit neatly onto a pre-mapped path.

Why It Matters Beyond the Trail

One thing that doesn't come up enough when people talk about outdoor apps is what happens to the places we explore. AllTrails' Public Lands Program is a free platform that works with park managers, nonprofits, and land agencies — more than 800 partners worldwide — to share visitor data that helps inform conservation and restoration efforts. When you contribute a review, check into a trail, or share a condition report, you're adding to a dataset that helps the people responsible for these places understand how they're being used and how to protect them. Exploring and stewardship, it turns out, go hand in hand.

For Every Kind of Adventurer

My brother downloads his maps, disappears into the backcountry, and resurfaces days later. My parents plan meticulously, log their steps, and share their routes from wherever in the world they happen to be walking. My family and I take the slow road — rivers, wildflowers, rocks that might be hiding salamanders and trails that leave enough energy at the end for ice cream in a small town we've never visited before.

AllTrails holds all of us. It doesn't matter how serious you are, how far you want to go, or whether you've never hiked in your life. The platform is built for every member of the outdoor community, from the person taking their first walk on a local nature path to the one planning a week-long ridge traverse. What it offers, at its core, is confidence — the confidence to show up somewhere new, know what you're getting into and then enjoy it.

The partnership between Lonely Planet and AllTrails is built on that idea: trusted guidance, whether it comes from a guidebook or a trail map, makes the difference between a good adventure and a great one.

Ready to explore? Lonely Planet readers can get 30% off AllTrails Plus at alltrails.com. Follow along at @alltrails and share what you find out there.

AllTrails is available on the Apple App Store, Google Play Store, and at alltrails.com.