Trail reviews written by people who actually showed up.
Route Reviewer is a collective of experienced hikers across the American West. We write honest, detailed reviews based on real visits. No paywalls. No sponsored rankings. No premium tier required to read a trail description.
Why we built this
Most trail resources have the same problem. They either bury useful information behind a subscription, drown you in crowd-sourced noise where a first-time hiker's opinion carries the same weight as someone who has done the route a dozen times, or they optimize for traffic instead of accuracy. You end up on a trailhead that looks nothing like what you prepared for.
We wanted something different. A place where every review is written by someone who has actually been there, who knows what the parking situation looks like at 7am on a Saturday in February, who can tell you honestly whether the scramble near the summit is manageable or genuinely exposed, and who is not trying to sell you anything.
Route Reviewer exists because good trail information should be free, specific, and written by people with real skin in the game.
Who writes our reviews
We are a distributed collective of hikers, trail runners, backpackers, and outdoor photographers based across the American West. Our contributors have been hiking seriously for years, many for decades. They live in the places they write about. They hike these trails on weekday mornings before work and on early weekend starts to beat the crowds. They know the difference between a trail that photographs well and one that actually delivers.
Our current contributors are based across:
Every review is written by someone local to or deeply familiar with the area. We do not publish reviews based on a single visit during ideal conditions. We do not accept payment to review or rank any trail. If a trail is overrated, we say so. If the parking situation is a disaster, we tell you that too.
How we rate trails
Most trail apps give you a difficulty rating and a star average from thousands of anonymous users. We think that misses most of what actually matters when you are deciding whether a trail is right for you on a given day.
Every trail on Route Reviewer is scored across five categories, each rated 1 to 10. The composite score is the average of all five.
A trail that scores a 6.6 overall because it is genuinely crowded and ecologically sparse — even if the views are a 9 — is more useful information than a generic four-star average. That is the point.
What we cover
We launched with a focus on the American Southwest because that is where most of our founding contributors are based. Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and southern California have some of the most spectacular and most misrepresented hiking in the country. We know this terrain well.
As our contributor network grows we will expand coverage across the Pacific Northwest, the Rockies, and beyond. The goal is not to cover every trail in America. It is to cover the trails we know deeply and write about them honestly.
Our review format
Every Route Reviewer trail page includes a full written review, a five-category rating breakdown, an elevation profile built from GPS data, a photo carousel from actual visits, directions and trailhead coordinates, and a virtual flyover built from the trail's GPS track so you can see the terrain before you go.
Everything is free. There is no premium tier. There is no account required. There are no ads. We are building something we would actually want to use ourselves.
Get in touch
If you have a correction, a trail suggestion, or you are an experienced local hiker interested in contributing, we would like to hear from you. Reach us at [email protected].