US Hiking Guides
Real trail data. No fluff. Plan the hike, not the search.
Distance, elevation gain, difficulty and the exact 2026 permit and fee rules for America’s best trails — checked against the National Park Service and stamped with the date we last verified them.
Fees, permits and closures come from official park pages — not recycled blog posts.
Every guide shows when we last checked its facts, and we re-verify seasonal figures each year.
Practical logistics — permits, timing, water, safety — not just a photo gallery.
Featured trail guides
All trails →Angels Landing
A 5.4-mile round trip climbing roughly 1,500 feet to one of the most exposed summit ridges in the National Park System. The final half-mile follows support chains along a narrow fin with sheer drops on both sides — spectacular, and not for anyone uneasy with heights.
Half Dome (Cables Route)
A 14–16-mile round trip with roughly 4,800 feet of gain, finishing with a 400-foot climb up bolted cables to a granite dome nearly 8,800 feet high. One of the most demanding day hikes in the country and a permit-only, cables-up-only objective.
Bright Angel Trail to Plateau Point
A 12-mile round trip descending about 3,080 feet from the South Rim to Plateau Point, with big views over the inner canyon and the Colorado River. Remember the canyon’s cruel arithmetic: the easy downhill start is the return climb in the heat.
Delicate Arch Trail
A 3-mile round trip climbing about 630 feet across open slickrock to the most famous freestanding arch in the world. Short but exposed — there is almost no shade and the rock radiates heat, so timing matters more than distance.
The Narrows (Bottom-Up)
Instead of a trail, you wade up the Virgin River itself, hemmed in by 1,000-foot sandstone walls that in places narrow to twenty feet across. The bottom-up route needs no permit and no technical skill — just a tolerance for cold water, a stick for balance, and real respect for flash floods.
Grinnell Glacier
The signature day hike of Glacier National Park: about 10.6 miles round trip climbing roughly 1,600 feet past turquoise, glacier-fed lakes to a viewpoint above Grinnell Glacier and its milky meltwater basin. You can trim a few miles by taking the summer boat shuttle across Swiftcurrent and Josephine lakes, but the climb from the lakes up to the glacier is where the real work — and the best scenery — is.
Turning the hike into a trip?
Our sister site Roam States covers where to stay, what else to see and how to build an itinerary around these parks.
We compile trail facts from official sources — the National Park Service, US Forest Service and park permit systems — and cross-check distance, elevation gain and permit rules before publishing. Every guide shows the date it was last verified. We are hikers writing for hikers; we are not a government agency and our guides are planning references, not a substitute for current official trail and weather advisories.