Open Data
We map trails and public land across the United States, and the summary figures behind that work are free to download and free to republish. Use them in an article, a research project, a class, or a map of your own — all we ask is a credit and a link.
Every file is rebuilt from the live map data, so these are a current snapshot rather than a one-off scrape. Each dataset states its own licence below, because they do not all come from the same place: the trail figures are derived from OpenStreetMap and carry its share-alike terms, while the public-land figures come from a US federal source and are in the public domain.
Last rebuilt 2026-09-02
US trail coverage by state
Named trail counts, total mileage, activity split and mapped points of interest for every US state.
51 rows, 13 columns. Licensed ODbL-1.0.
US trail coverage by county
Named trail counts, total mileage, activity split and mapped points of interest for every published US county.
2,122 rows, 13 columns. Licensed ODbL-1.0.
US trail miles by activity and state
Named trail mileage per state split by activity — hiking, mountain biking, trail running, equestrian, OHV and ski. Activity columns overlap: one trail can carry several activities, so they sum to more than total_miles.
51 rows, 11 columns. Licensed ODbL-1.0.
Licence and attribution
Trail datasets. These figures are counts and sums computed over OpenStreetMap data, so they carry OpenStreetMap’s licence: the Open Database License (ODbL) 1.0. You may copy, adapt and redistribute them, including commercially, provided you credit the source and keep any redistributed database under the same licence. Please credit as: Trailmonger, derived from OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL).
Public land dataset. Derived from PAD-US, a US Geological Survey product. A work of the US federal government carries no copyright, so this one is public domain and share-alike does not apply. A credit is appreciated but not required: Trailmonger, derived from the USGS Protected Areas Database of the United States (PAD-US), public domain.
Either way, a link to trailmonger.com/data is welcome.
The licence text is repeated in the header of every CSV and as fields in every JSON file, so it travels with the data rather than living only on this page.
What is and is not here
These are aggregate figures. We do not publish the underlying trail geometry here — it comes from OpenStreetMap, and anyone who wants it should take it from the source, which is more current than any copy we could host.
Two notes on reading the numbers, because both are easy to get wrong. In the activity dataset the per-activity columns overlap — a single trail can be hiking, running and mountain biking at once — so they add up to more than the total mileage, and that is correct rather than a fault. In the public-land dataset, public_acres counts owned land only; designation overlays such as wilderness and national monuments sit on top of that same ground, so they are reported in their own column and must never be added to the total. Summing every PAD-US category together roughly triples the real figure.
We do not publish whitewater rapid data here either. We map it, but it comes from American Whitewater rather than an open source, and we would rather leave it out than republish someone else’s work without settled permission.
We also do not redistribute our property-parcel or hunting-unit layers. Those are assembled from state and county sources whose terms permit us to use them in the app but not to hand them on — several are restricted by statute. Being able to reach data is not the same as being allowed to republish it, and we would rather say so plainly than quietly leave it out.
Corrections and requests
If a figure looks wrong, it is usually because the underlying map is wrong — the fastest fix is to correct it in OpenStreetMap, and it will flow through on our next rebuild. For anything else, or if you need a cut of this data we do not publish, email admin@trailmonger.com.
Full source credits for everything in the app are on our data credits page.