This story was originally produced by the Concord Monitor. NHPR is republishing it in partnership with the Granite State News Collaborative.
New Hampshire’s 161-mile section of the Appalachian Trail saw 2.88 million “recreational visits” in 2025, according to estimates from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy, making us the second-most visited state by A.T. hikers.
Only Virginia, which has almost a quarter of the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail, had more people hiking on at least a portion of its trail in 2025.
The figures are estimates, since there’s no check-in procedure for the A.T., which runs from Georgia to Maine. The conservancy and the National Park Service calculated 2025 visitation “using aggregated, anonymized mobile location data combined with trail counters and field observations,” coordinated with the park service’s Social Science Program, according to a statement.
New Hampshire’s stretch of the trail goes through the White Mountains. Given the elevation gain and erratic weather, it is considered the most difficult part of the 2,200-mile trail, rivaled only by the stretch in Maine.
Maine’s part of the trail had by far the fewest estimated visits of any state, about 85,000, even though it has 251 miles of the Appalachian Trail, ending at Mt. Katahdin. This is probably because its distance from population centers compared to the rest of the trail makes it less accessible to casual hikers.
This is the first time the Appalachian Trail was included in the National Park Service’s Annual Park Ranking Report, which ranks visitation of places on lands managed by the National Park Service. Approximately one-third of the Appalachian Trail is on Park Service lands, and those parts of the route experienced 6.2 million visits in 2025.
The rest of the Appalachian Trail is on USDA Forest Service land and public lands managed by state agencies and local townships.
