Overconfidence can ruin a good hike. When I surf through outdoor sites on social media, here’s the essence of what I usually find: “This hike may be hot, long and occasionally off trail, but it’s rewarding, and route-finding really isn’t that difficult.”
With advice like that assuring what seems a doable hike, it’s probably not surprising that during 2025, Grand Canyon Search and Rescue responded to 848 hiker assists and 232 search and rescue incidents. What’s more, 11 people died. In just the month of May last year, there were 13 rescues in a seven-day stretch.
One of the “in” hikes these days is the Grand Canyon rim-to-rim. This involves hiking 21 to 24 miles with almost 10,000 feet of elevation change. This feat requires serious levels of fitness and preparation. Yet on social media, posters encourage complete strangers to go for it, even daring people to try it twice. That would be almost 50 miles.
This seems like telling strangers traveling to Boston to be sure and run the marathon while there. After all, lots of runners do it in four hours.
All of this makes me yearn for a little humility. When I led hikes for my local Sierra Club chapter, I would post that the trail was for experienced hikers. I then got calls from people who had never even laced up their boots before, saying they had read online that someone ran it in three hours, so how hard could it be? Well, I’ve read about climbing K2 without oxygen, but that does not mean anyone can do it.
Online posters always like to brag about what a piece of cake it was for them, so surely an average hiker could do the same thing. But “surely” might turn into finishing a hike at midnight or knocking on the door of the ranger station at 2 a.m., whimpering that they simply cannot go another step. Or they may end up being one of those search and rescues.
No one seems to post that a hike in Grand Canyon was the gnarliest thing they have ever done, that they almost collapsed on the trail due to heat stroke — a current danger — and thirst.
Print media is often no better. Outdoor magazines tout “Ten trails where you will never see another hiker!” That’s usually because the trail is expert-only, or not really a trail at all. I have met these backpackers far from the madding crowd, and usually they aren’t where they thought they were because they tried but lost the “see no other hikers” route.
Backcountry rangers have told me that they cringe every time one of these articles comes out. Partly because sending novices onto expert routes often results in calls to SAR, and partly because when hikers get lost, they often construct unnecessary and often misleading trail cairns which then must be removed. Nor does it help that the Park Service isn’t as adequately staffed to help hikers after losing about one-quarter of its permanent staff since January 2025.
Online influencers rarely have skin in the game. Have they even been to the trail they brag about? In cyberspace, one may say anything and there is no way to fact-check. I could post that I was the first woman to hike rim-to-rim with one foot tied behind my back, and no one could prove otherwise.
We need more humble hikers, people who post that a difficult and popular hike is not a creampuff, that it was a long, scary trek and they came out after dark with no flashlights, threw themselves at the feet of the nearest park ranger, and pledged their first born for a drink of water.
I hope humble-hike descriptions may one day be welcome. Most hikers might not want to admit that they could not blithely knock off 20-plus miles with a song on their smiling lips, but they might relish the truth of a posting that went like this: “It was the hardest thing I have done IN MY ENTIRE LIFE, I threw my pack at the nearest dumpster, and I am now going to track down the person who said it was a cakewalk and slap him upside the head.”
I can only hope that this might generate a few “likes.”
Marjorie “Slim” Woodruff, a Grand Canyon educator, is a contributor to Writers on the Range, writersontherange.org, an independent nonprofit dedicated to spurring lively conversation about the West.
