The 2024 Appalachian Trail Thru-Hiker Survey: General Information Part 2

Here we are again with the second installment of the 2024 Appalachian Trail Survey! This is part two of the general information. While the first general post mainly covered demographics, this one addresses the overall experience on the trail. This includes typical hiker habits in towns and on trail, safety and injury, thru-hiker favorites, and more. We asked some new and more detailed questions this year, including a divisive look at food storage practices. Keep reading to find out more!

This year we collected 389 responses — a huge thanks to everyone who filled out the survey! The data was collected from October through November of 2024 through our survey, which was marketed using our social media platforms, Backpacker Radio, and TheTrek.co. Some responses from previous years were removed, and obvious mistakes in start and end dates were adjusted. No obvious duplicates were found.

Read Part 1 Here

Companionship

We asked hikers who their companions were on the trail at both the start and end of their hikes. Although a majority (70 percent of hikers started solo, 51 percent were hiking with friends made along the trail by the end of their hike. We hope this helps ease the minds of those worried about going solo! There’s plenty of opportunity to make friends on the trail if that’s what you want.

These numbers have been remarkably constant over the years, with only small deviations from one year to the next.

We also asked hikers about their relationship status at the start and end of their hike. You may have noticed in the previous chart that there was a slight uptick in hikers completing most of the trail with a significant other compared to those who started with one, suggesting that some hikers might be meeting their significant others on-trail. Indeed, here we see that 8 percent of hikers in this year’s survey finished the trail in a new relationship with someone they met along the way.

Hikers were more likely to be in a relationship by the end of the trail than they were at the start: 46 percent of respondents started out single, while 42 percent were single by the end of their hikes. It looks like the hikers who met someone along the way were somewhat offset by those whose relationships ended along the way, diminishing the apparent relationship-ifying effect of the AT somewhat.

Most (but not all) of those in a relationship or married stayed in their relationships throughout the hike. This was true regardless of if their partner was on the hike with them or not.

Hiking/life partners aside, how often did people actually hike alone on the AT this year? There doesn’t appear to be any strong trend here. The time people spent hiking with others is spread widely across the board.

One-third of people spent less than a third of their time hiking alone. 27 percent fall on the other end of the spectrum, spending 75 percent or more of their time hiking alone. Another 41 percent fall somewhere in the middle. 

We asked hikers about how often they camped alone too, and that data is much less divided. It is much more common to camp with others than alone on the AT. The majority of hikers (69 percent) slept alone less than 25 percent of the time, while only 19 percent camped alone more than half the time.

Intersetingly, most hikers this year said they normally chose to avoid shelters, with 60 percent of hikers sleeping in shelters less than 25 percent of the time. Only 15 percent of hikers slept in shelters more than half the time. Some hikers might be camping in their tents near the shelters, though, even if they’re not sleeping inside them.

Crowding

More people learn about long trails and thru-hiking every year. It’s no secret that the AT can get crowded, especially in the “bubble.” We asked hikers how often they had difficulty finding a campsite. Luckily, most hikers didn’t deal with this often. Almost 30 percent of hikers never had any issues finding a campsite, and 51 percent only struggled to find a site two nights or less. Less than 10 percent of hikers struggled to find a campsite on more than 10 nights.

Although it wasn’t that difficult to find a campsite, that doesn’t mean it wasn’t crowded. Some 90 hikers said the largest number of people they counted at a campsite was 30. A quarter of responses fell between 25-30 as the highest number of hikers, with 70 percent falling between 15 and 35 hikers as the highest.

The most hikers someone said they saw at one campsite was 250, wow! We don’t know the context here, but this respondent did attend the Harpers Ferry Flip-Flop Kickoff Festival, so perhaps they’re counting the festival camping area or something similar.

Leave No Trace

We hope hikers are good stewards of Leave No Trace (LNT), which means a lot of things, including not leaving trash behind. 97 percent of hikers packed out all of their trash, including 41 percent who also packed out others’ trash when they could.

We added a new question to the survey this year related to Leave No Trace — specifically food storage. We asked hikers what their main method of food storage was when there were no bear box, pole, or cable available. The ATC encourages hikers to carry bear canisters due to their reliability and ease of use.

Despite that, the bear canister is one of the least popular food storage methods on the AT, coming in just ahead of bear-resistant cloth bags like the Ursack. It will be interesting to watch this trend over the years. Will canisters become more widely accepted as more and more trails nationwide require or strongly encourage their use?

If bear canisters are the most foolproof way to secure food, sleeping with food in the tent is the least. Yet that was the most popular strategy according to our survey. 43 percent of hikers said that was their main method of food storage. It’s certainly not the recommended practice, but it does appear to be a common one.

Traditional bear hangs were also relatively popular, with 36 percent of hikers using this as their main strategy.

Most hikers spent the night in town when they went in for resupplies on most or all occasions. Just less than a third said they rarely spent a night in town, and only 1 percent never slept in towns.

Safety

Every hiker should feel safe while thru-hiking, but that’s not always the case. We asked hikers various questions about any threats to their safety, sexual harassment, and discrimination they may have faced. 18 percent of hikers felt that their safety was threatened at some point on trail due to other human activity.

For hikers who did experience sexual harassment or racial discrimination, we also asked if it was another hiker or a non-hiker who treated them this way. Respondents said threatening acts were more commonly committed by other hikers: of 28 reported incidents of sexual harassment, 20 were attributed to fellow hikers, while four of the seven reported incidents of racial discrimination were attributed to fellow hikers.

Another new question we asked hikers this year was if they carried a weapon for protection, and if so, what kind. 30 percent of hikers said they did carry some form of protection — mostly knives and pepper spray. Four hikers carried guns. The numbers are all in the table below.

Injuries

Over half of hikers experienced some form of injury during their hike this year. Luckily, it didn’t affect most of their hikes much, if at all. Only 5 percent of hikers had to end their hike due to injuries.

The different types of injuries are included in the table below. We also looked at which injuries may be more likely to affect a hike this year, which is also included below. A sprain of some sort was the most common injury. A few hikers said their injuries affected their hikes in ways not specified in the table below, which is why the rows don’t all total.

The ways in which an injury affected peoples’ hikes is mostly correlated to how common the injury was. However, tendonitis did seem to cause more problems for hikers than other injuries: it didn’t end anyone’s journey, but most afflicted hikers slowed down or took time off as a result.

It takes some grit to thru-hike, and that was on full display here — 40 percent said they didn’t let their injuries slow them down and just hiked through the pain. Of 14 hikers who reported broken bones, only 2 said this ended their hikes; 6 of them didn’t even slow down or take time off but just kept hiking as normal. Props to you guys.

Hikers frequently lose weight during a long thru-hike. Almost three-quarters of this year’s AT class lost some amount of weight. No hikers reported having gained 30 or more pounds.

When looking at the chart above, bear in mind that men significantly outnumbered women in this year’s survey: 63 percent of respondents compared to 36 percent, respectively. Even so, taking gender into account provides some interesting data, most notably in the 30+ pound weight loss category. As a whole, only 63 percent of women lost weight compared to the 78 percent of men who did.

We asked hikers which resources they used and whether they found them helpful or inspiring. FarOut (formerly Guthook) was the most helpful resource, followed by theTrek.co (thanks everyone!) and YouTube. “A Walk in the Woods,” both the movie and the book, were found to be the least helpful. These rankings haven’t changed from last year.

Another common resource that was commonly mentioned but not included on the list was speaking with previous thru-hikers. 

Here are the links to the most helpful resources, although the most popular YouTube channels and Facebook groups hikers watched/joined are unknown. Homemade Wanderlust (aka Dixie) was a commonly mentioned YouTuber.

1. 1. The FarOut App, formerly Guthook
   2. TheTrek.co
   3. Youtube
   4. The A.T. Guide – by David “AWOL” Miller
   5.  Facebook groups

Favorites

Once again, Southernmost Virginia was the most popular section among hikers, but it was followed closely by Baxter State Park. The White Mountains beat out the Roanoke region for third place this year. Northern Pennsylvania was — again — the least popular section of trail by far.

Shaw’s Hiker Hostel in Maine once again claimed the title for most popular hostel on trail. Woods Hole Hostel and Maine Roadhouse were in a tight race, but Woods Hole took second place this year. These have routinely been in the top 3 favorite hostels.

Funnily enough, both Shaw’s and Woods Hole hostels were in the top 3 most popular restaurants as well — in this list, Woods Hole comes out on top.  Smokey Mountain Diner in Hot Springs took second place.

For a feel-good wrap on our general information post, we asked hikers to rank the best part of their AT experience with the option to write in their own “other” responses. “The people” was the most popular 1st and 2nd ranking by a large margin.

Very broadly speaking, hikers said the people were the best thing about the trail, nature and/or the trail itself were the second- and third-best things, trail towns were fourth, and solitude was fifth. A popular theme in the write-in responses was the challenge of the hike — both physical and mental.

That’s a wrap on the General Information for the 2024 Appalachian Trail Thru-Hiker Survey! We hope you found it insightful and informative. Upcoming posts will detail AT hikers’ favorite footwear, backpacks, shelter systems, sleeping bags, and stoves/filters.

To stay up to date on the latest survey posts, make sure to subscribe to our newsletter.

Congratulations to all the Appalachian Trail hikers this year — and a huge thank you to all of you who took the time to fill out the survey!

Featured image: Graphic design by Chris Helm.