What Are the Best States in the U.S. for Hiking?

Caroline Morse Teel is the Managing Editor for SmarterTravel Media. Follow her adventures around the world on Instagram @TravelWithCaroline.

See recent posts by Caroline Morse Teel

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Planning a fall hike? You’ll have a better time in Alaska than in Kentucky, according to a study from FitRated. FitRated analyzed Yelp reviews for over 16,000 hiking trails across the country to determine which states have the best and worst hikes.

According to FitRated, the top 10 states for hiking are:

Alaska
Arkansas
Hawaii
Washington, D.C.
Iowa
Arizona
Utah
West Virginia
Nevada
North Carolina

The study also looked at which states had the largest proportion of bad reviews for trails and determined that Kentucky was the worst state for hiking in the U.S., with twenty percent of trails rated as three stars or less.

The results of this survey should be read with some skepticism, as FitRated didn’t sort through the data to make sure trails were actually trails. (For example, FitRated counted Manhattan’s paved and elevated High Line in this study, which seems like a very loose definition of a “hiking trail”.)

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