AllTrails as Neurological Laziness
Hiking with AllTrails is like having a mini guide in your pocket. On a backpacking trip this past weekend with my dad, we used the popular navigation app throughout to tell us distances and elevations, look at trail junctions, and generally keep us on course. It can tell you how long a hike will typically take, how much further you have to travel, the average five-star rating of a hike, and will even buzz to let you know when you’ve stepped off trail. To this end, it functions as a guardrail for hikers, reassuring users that they’re safely within the bounds of the hike, making it harder to be lost.
I often find myself defaulting towards using AllTrails (or Gaia, NPS, onX Backcountry, etc.) even when I have the ability to navigate using a map and compass. It can be fun to magically tell campers the answer to the dreaded question “how much longer?” while slyly checking my illicit phone. Seeing the precise mileage or elevation I covered in a day can feel like an accomplishment, too. But above all, it’s because it feels easy.
I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one that feels an instinctual draw towards using these apps. Part of my inclination is due to the fact that I’m very accustomed to navigation technologies in urban settings. It can sometimes feel difficult to imagine people used to get around town without Google Maps. In many ways, I feel that my senses have been dulled by relying on Maps: I hardly know the name of a single highway and still pull out my phone before driving to my grandma’s house, even though I’ve been many times — proficiency that 20 years ago was requisite for getting anywhere. Supremely convenient map apps simplify the experience of driving, boiling it down to listening to calmly read instructions and following a blue line, thus eliminating the required awareness of the dozens of road signs that pass every minute and lowering the information processing and cognitive load required to get from point A to B. Maps are just one category of the many apps that streamline the urban lived experience.
In many ways, humans default to paths of least resistance. On a neurological level, as we consistently perform an action, our synapses send signals and form connections. The more that we repeat these actions, the stronger connections grow, requiring less energy each time. Given that our brains consume 20% of our metabolic energy (while taking up about 1/40th of our mass), energy efficiency is biologically critical: the less energy used in the brain, the less energy required to survive.
Some research shows that we have evolved to favor simple, habitual tasks because of their lower energy use. Defaulting to well-formed paths is more efficient, which in turn can feel rewarding. In the workplace, this cognitive laziness promotes box-checking activities, like answering mindless emails or entering data. These activities are easily performed in autopilot using well-established neural pathways, and can feel productive and mildly addictive, in part due to their neurological efficiency and associated evolutionary rewards.
I’ll argue, though, that there’s a great deal to be gained from suppressing our autopilot instincts. There’s a disconnect between cheap, instantaneous rewards of simple tasks, and the far greater feeling of solving a difficult problem and the self-sufficiency that follows. Going beyond the default path of cognitive least resistance can be initially and instinctively frustrating, but ultimately fulfilling.
Thinking about my own most rewarding outdoor experiences, analog navigation played a critical role. Developing outdoor capabilities and skills is innately rewarding. The first time I successfully navigated off-trail or was able to identify distant peaks was exhilarating. This past weekend, I didn’t need to use any of those capabilities, since we had an app showing us the correct path.
Beyond feelings of self-sufficiency, though, the fundamental hiking experience is completely different when navigating by hand. While driving, map apps enable one to focus on conversation or the audiobook playing over the speakers. Outdoors, though, there’s far more to be gained from awareness. Forced to pay strict attention to features, I’m far more aware of my surroundings, on both a large and small scale. Jagged peaks can certainly be helpful in pinpointing a location, but so can the fact that I crossed three streams and hiked slightly uphill in the last hour. Relying on a map in hand makes me far more present in my outdoor experience, rooting me in my surroundings.
Perhaps the greatest psychological loss of AllTrails use is the linear consumption of hikes. The experience becomes simplified to moving a blue and white arrow along a green line from one end of a phone screen to another, counting down the remaining miles. In this way, you can “check off” a hike (don’t forget to rate and review!) and add it to your collection. There’s no need to look up when you know you’re on trail, and you’re free to focus on plodding along, putting one foot in front of the other until your destination is reached.
Using AllTrails turned my weekend backpack into something more fitness-oriented, and I was aware of my pace and progress as if I were watching miles tick up on a treadmill. My mindset shifted from slowly enjoying my surroundings to quickly counting down the miles in order to feel the rush of accomplishment at the end. Certainly, this feeds into the “conquering” outdoor ideology, which moves outdoor recreation culture further from appreciation (not to mention this narrative’s problematic ties with taking over indigenous land). This consumption is continually popularized as part of mainstream outdoor media, displaying (yes, incredible and inspiring) conquests of far-flung peaks or increasingly arbitrary challenges. But I digress.
The important thing to consider is, why are we actually outside? I don’t want to undermine the sense of accomplishment that comes from difficult outdoor experiences — I certainly have many cherished memories from challenging trips. But to me, so much of what is unique to the outdoors experience is cultivating strong self awareness and sense of place, all the while developing an improved sense of self-sufficiency. Navigating “old school” reinforces these unique elements by forcing you to turn off autopilot and engage with your surroundings on a higher level. It’s a different sort of mental challenge altogether, shifting from a simple linear problem (following a set path) to a nonlinear one (am I even on the path?!). As an act, it suppresses the cognitive instinct to simplify experiences, and instead increases awareness of the nuances of surroundings while giving practice solving richer problems.
AllTrails has the wonderful impact of enabling more people to be comfortable outside, and I recognize that not everyone is ready to take the leap to map-and-compass. But as confidence increases, relying on traditional navigation has the potential for new joys and an altogether different immersive experience — one which I think is well worth the loss of convenience and extra neural work.
To optimize this transitory experience away from digital navigation, I don’t believe it’s necessary to have the sort of traditional outdoor education that has enabled me to feel comfortable outdoors. For starters, keeping a paper map in hand while hiking can inspire curiosity about surrounding features. Making navigation decisions based on paper and intuition before checking AllTrails could be a next step. Gradually removing digital sidekicks can slowly shift the outdoors experience into one that contrasts the urban day-to-day, instead of one that mirrors it.
In the end, though, I doubt that outdoorspeople will ever move away from digital navigation — it’s just too convenient, and is constantly improving. Plus, a whole generation of young hikers have never seen anything else. My hope is that newly enabled users can optimize these tools to preserve unique aspects of the outdoors experience by balancing their usage with awareness and serenity. In the end, it’s possible that through added outdoor enthusiasts, these apps will contribute to more, not less, appreciation and wonder in the outdoors.
Partway through our second day on the hike, we followed a sign for Sunrise Lakes, only to discover after hiking a mile and a half up a beautiful canyon that it wasn’t our intended route. So maybe we weren’t so absorbed in AllTrails in the end :)
