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A bright line on a hiking app tells you who recorded it — not whether there’s a path.

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A downloadable route isn't a vetted route

By Lee McCoy — 72% of the 214 Wainwrights walked, all seasons, Strava-verified Updated 5 July 2026

The short answer

A downloadable route is not a checked route. Many crowd-sourced “routes” are really one person’s recorded track — and a bright line on a hiking app measures who recorded it, not whether there’s a path. These apps are genuinely useful, and we use this kind of data ourselves for ideas. This page is about one specific blind spot: how a runner’s line becomes a dotted line an unprepared walker follows onto loose crag — and how to spot a bad line before you commit to it.

Read this first

This isn’t “apps are bad”. Mapping apps are excellent for ideas and an overview, and mountain-rescue teams say the same. The problem is a narrow one: the data pipeline that turns a recorded line into a plain dotted line, with the difficulty and the context stripped out. Everything here is reported as sourced, and causation is kept calibrated — apps and social media are a contributing factor that rescuers have flagged, not a proven sole cause.

Chapter 0The honest version, up front

Let’s start where the mountain-rescue teams do: the apps are great for ideas, and a poor choice as your only means of navigation. We browse them for inspiration too. So this page isn’t a hot take on any one app — it’s the whole argument, in one place, about a specific and well-documented blind spot: a crowd-sourced line is not a vetted route, and the difference has put walkers on ground they couldn’t get off.

What makes this worth reading in one sitting: the national numbers, the exact Lakeland mechanism with the rescue teams’ own words, the plain-English route vs track distinction, a sniff-test you can keep, and an honest account — ours included — of what a genuinely checked route looks like.

Chapter 1The scale — the numbers

Mountain-rescue call-outs are at record highs. In 2024, teams in England & Wales were called out every day of the year for the first time, and Scottish Mountain Rescue passed 1,000 call-outs for the first time (Advnture; Scottish Mountain Rescue). Ordnance Survey’s analysis of the rescue data found rescues up 24% between 2019 and 2024 (Ordnance Survey).

The sharpest change is who’s being rescued. Rescues of 18–24-year-olds nearly doubled, from 166 to 314 over the same five years — now the biggest age group needing help (OS; Advnture). That’s the group most likely to be navigating phone-first. It rides a wider boom: hill and mountain walkers were up about 40% between 2016 and 2023 (Sport England, via Advnture).

Rescuers are careful about cause, and so are we. Mountain Rescue England & Wales chief executive Mike Park put it this way: “We know from incident reports that more and more people are tempted into risky locations by Instagram posts. Add to that a tendency to follow popular routes online without knowing the hazards and context, and it’s not surprising that those likely to be relying most on their phones are the ones getting into difficulties.” It’s a contributing factor, flagged in incident reports — not a single proven cause. Correlation isn’t causation, and we keep the calibrated verbs throughout. For the fuller rescue picture, see our Mountain Rescue Data Report.

The compiled figures and documented cases behind this piece are a public dataset — each row carries its basis, geography, year, confidence and source: route-safety-stats.csv. Official and on-the-record sources only, and we include the apps’ and OpenStreetMap’s right of reply — the problem is the pipeline stripping context, not any one app.

Chapter 2 · the crown jewelHow a bad line is born

Here is the pipeline, end to end, that turns a fell-runner’s line into a dotted line an unprepared walker follows onto crag. It is not anyone acting in bad faith — it’s context being stripped out at each hand-off.

Step 1A runner's lineA fell-runner records a fastline over rough groundStep 2Strava heat mapEnough recordings make it abright, popular-looking lineStep 3OpenStreetMapSurveyed and graded difficult(SAC T3)Step 4A hiking appThe grade is stripped; itrenders as a plain dotted line↓ What the walker meets on the grounda real path……fades to a dotted line……stops at a cragcragfast → 999
How a bad line is born: a runner’s recorded line becomes a popular heat-map line, is surveyed and graded difficult on OpenStreetMap, then rendered by a consumer app as a plain dotted line — which fades out where the ground turns to scree and crag. Schematic © Lee McCoy.

The case — Barf, 3 January 2023

Three women and a dog followed an AllTrails route up the steep face of Barf, above Bassenthwaite. In Keswick Mountain Rescue Team’s own words, “there is no path via this route, only lines of scree”, and it requires the walker to negotiate the rocky outcrop of Slape Crag. Descending in fading light and poor visibility, they became cragfast and, wisely, called 999 (Keswick MRT). The team roped them down uninjured.

Why was that line in the app at all? Because it exists on the ground as a runners’ and scramblers’ line, not a walkers’ path. The same week, a walker on Causey Pike was, as reported, “bang on the dotted line on the app but couldn’t find the path on the ground” — a line that is part of a fell-running round and bright on the Strava heat map. Keswick MRT’s Craig Dring made the point that experienced runners may be fine on it, but there is not a proper path formed (reported by The Great Outdoors, 2023). Popularity on a heat map measures who recorded a line — a user base that skews to runners and athletes — not whether it is safe to walk.

The same lines showed up across several apps — AllTrails, the free OpenStreetMap layer, Outdooractive, Komoot and others — because they all draw on the same crowd-sourced source, OpenStreetMap. And here is the crux: OpenStreetMap had actually surveyed and graded the Slape Crag line as difficult mountain terrain. That grade is the context. When a consumer app renders it as an undifferentiated dotted line, the context is what gets lost (The Great Outdoors, 2023). As the writer Alex Roddie put it, an app route “is presented as something you can follow safely… there is no obvious reason to doubt it” — and the deeper point, “mapping a mountain isn’t the same as mapping a city” (via The Great Outdoors, 2023).

In fairness — the other side

This is a pipeline problem, not villainy, and the parties said as much. OpenStreetMap contributors declined to remove the Barf line on the grounds that it is a real, surveyed feature with a difficulty rating attached — the map’s job is to record what’s there, and a dangerous path is better signposted than deleted. Komoot has said its leisure-walking routing won’t send people up the hardest graded paths and that it surfaces “dangerous terrain” warnings. Ordnance Survey removed the specific line from its app’s OpenStreetMap layer (The Great Outdoors, 2023). The fix everyone points to is the same: apps rendering the difficulty grade the underlying data already holds.

Chapter 3 · the technical heartRoute vs track — “someone walked it” isn’t “you can follow it”

This is the single distinction that explains most of it. A route is a path someone planned or drew — ideally snapped to known trails by someone who knows the ground. A track is a raw recording of where a GPS actually went: complete with the recorder’s wrong turns and off-path detours, and the tell-tale straight-line glitches where the signal dropped and re-acquired (CalTopo; Garmin). Many crowd-sourced “routes” are really just someone’s raw track, re-shared as if it were a plan.

So two things a bright line can’t tell you: whether the recorder stayed on a sensible line, and whether you could. And a straight segment between two features isn’t a shortcut — it’s usually an artefact, or a plan drawn optimistically across ground the drawer never checked.

The straight-line trap — Broad Stand, 2018

The vivid version: the map suggests a direct line, the ground says no. In 2018, five walkers (in their late teens) believed they could go directly from Scafell to Scafell Pike — two summits that look a stone’s throw apart on a small screen. They became cragfast on the serious ground around Broad Stand and were roped off — roughly 24 hours after a man died in a fall at the same spot (grough). Wasdale Mountain Rescue Team’s message is blunt and worth memorising: “There is no easy route direct from Scafell to Scafell Pike.”

From my own walking

“I’ve come up against plenty of routes that look perfectly logical on an online route-maker, but are far more troubling once you’re actually on them than they seemed at home. The line from Mardale Ill Bell to Harter Fell, above Small Water, is a good example — much more serious in snow. And here’s the catch: OpenStreetMap shows a precipice there, but the Garmin Connect map doesn’t. These maps flatten everything out.”

— Lee. The lesson: the same ground looks different on different maps, and none of them show you what it feels like underfoot. Read the contours, not just the line.

Chapter 4 · the skill to keepSniff-test a line before you trust it

You can catch most bad lines yourself in under a minute, before you ever leave the house. The questions below are the sniff-test — each one is a reason to slow down and cross-check on proper 1:25k mapping.

Is this line trustworthy? A 30-second sniff-test

Before you commit to a downloadable line, ask these questions. Tick the ones that are true. This won't tell you a line is safe — it can't see your actual GPX — it just surfaces the questions worth asking, and where to check.

Questions to ask, not a verdict. Decision-support, not decision-making: a clear sniff-test can still miss a bad line, and a few flags don't always mean danger. Always cross-check on 1:25k topographic mapping and carry the skills to turn back.

A cross-check that worksWatch someone walk it first

The best antidote to a flat map or a dotted line is to watch the ground itself. Search a fell or a route name on YouTube and you’ll usually find someone who has walked it, filmed the tricky bits, and shown you the path — or the lack of one — in a way no map can. It’s the closest thing to a recce without leaving the sofa: you see the exposure, where the trod fades, how steep the descent really is, and what the ground is like underfoot. For anyone who doesn’t yet find contours easy to read, it can be the single most useful cross-check there is.

Two honest caveats. A video is one person’s day in one set of conditions — a summer film won’t show you the winter reality (the same “maps flatten everything” trap in a different guise) — and a confident presenter is not a graded route. Treat it as a vivid cross-check, not a guarantee.

The channels I trust

These are the Lakeland hikers whose accounts I personally trust most — experienced, honest about the conditions, and good at showing the ground as it really is. Search any of them for the fell you’re headed to:

Not a sponsored list — just walkers whose judgement I’ve come to trust. Watch a couple of accounts of the same route rather than one, and pair the video with the 1:25k map: that’s a far better picture than a dotted line alone.

Chapter 5What “vetted” actually means — honestly

So what should a checked route carry that a dotted line doesn’t? Explicit provenance (was this planned at a desk or walked on the ground?), named warnings and error-spots for the tricky stages, a difficulty rationale, and — the honest bit — a clear flag where a route is not yet ground-verified.

We’ll hold ourselves to that here, because overclaiming would be the exact sin this page is about. We do not personally walk every route. Of our 152 route guides, 10 carry a completed, ground-verified pass — they show a “written and walked by Lee” byline and a last-reviewed date — and the rest are desk-planned from mapping and clearly flagged as not yet walked. What every one carries is the provenance and the warnings, so you always know what has been checked and what hasn’t. That’s the difference between a vetted route and a bright line: not that a human walked it, but that a human told you the truth about what they did and didn’t check.

And even a walked route is never a guarantee. We walk many of them directly, and read the map for the rest with enough experience to flag the likely problem spots — but the ground changes with the weather and the seasons. A path that’s a stroll in June can be a different proposition under snow. So the final call is always yours, made against the conditions in front of you as you approach — which is exactly the judgement this whole page is about. Browse the route guides and look for the byline and the stage notes.

Chapter 6So how should you use the apps?

Constructively, and the rescue teams and Ordnance Survey agree on the shape of it:

AnswersFrequently asked questions

Is AllTrails safe to use?

Yes, as a tool for ideas and an overview — like every mapping app, it is genuinely useful and we use this kind of data ourselves. The blind spot is narrow but real: some crowd-sourced lines are one person's recorded track over rough ground, shown as a plain dotted line with the difficulty stripped out. Use the apps to plan and browse, navigate on proper 1:25k topographic mapping with the skills to match, carry a paper map, and don't follow a dotted line onto ground where you can't see a path.

What is the difference between a route and a track?

A route is a path someone planned or drew, ideally snapped to known trails by someone who knows the ground. A track is a raw recording of where a GPS actually went — complete with the recorder's wrong turns, off-path detours, and straight-line glitches where the signal dropped and re-acquired. Many crowd-sourced 'routes' are really just someone's raw track, so 'someone walked it' is not the same as 'you can follow it'.

Why did the path on my app not exist on the ground?

Because a bright line on an app measures who recorded it, not whether there is a path. A fell-runner's or scrambler's line can end up in the data, get popular on a heat map, and be rendered as an ordinary dotted line even where there is only loose scree or a crag. On Barf in the Lake District in January 2023, walkers followed an app route up the steep face where, in the rescue team's words, 'there is no path via this route, only lines of scree', and became cragfast.

Are Strava heat-map routes safe to follow?

Not necessarily. A heat map shows where people with the app have been — and that user base skews towards runners and athletes — so a bright line can be a runners' line over ground with no walkers' path. Popularity is not safety. Cross-check any heat-map line against 1:25k mapping and the difficulty grade before you trust it.

Does hikes.guide personally walk every route?

No, and we won't pretend otherwise — that would be the exact overclaim this page warns about. Of our 152 route guides, 10 carry a completed, ground-verified pass (they show a 'written and walked by Lee' byline); the rest are desk-planned from mapping and clearly flagged as not yet ground-verified. What every route carries is explicit provenance and named warnings, so you always know what has been checked and what hasn't.

Every figure and quote here is attributed to a named source and dated; incidents are reported as the rescue teams and outlets reported them, with the apps’ and OpenStreetMap’s own responses included. Spotted something that looks wrong, or want a characterisation corrected? Please use the Report a Problem link in the footer — accuracy and fairness come first.

Written by Lee McCoy, a Lake District fell-walker working through the 214 Wainwrights — 72% done so far, Strava-verified — who built and writes hikes.guide. This page reports third-party incidents and statements exactly as sourced; it does not allege that any named company caused harm.