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Free Planning Course for the American Discovery Trail

Free Email Course · Six Parts

The American Discovery Trail is 6,800 miles on paper and about 4,900 under your feet. Six emails, one every two weeks, on the difference between those two numbers and everything else you have to decide before you walk.

Written for people planning a coast-to-coast hike and for section hikers working through a state at a time. The first email arrives the moment you sign up, with the complete Delaware turn-by-turn guide attached, free.

An American Discovery Trail marker on a wooden post beside the C and O Canal Towpath, with a dirt path curving left toward open water and a paved path running right
A trail marker on the C&O Canal Towpath in Maryland. Photo by Bernie Krausse

What the six cover

The Installments

Six emails · one every two weeks
Two routes across America, and how to pick yours Where the trail divides, what each route asks of you, and the number almost everyone gets wrong Day 0
Plan the trail one state at a time Cutting 4,900 miles into sections anchored to towns that can actually feed you Day 14
The box that didn't arrive A hiker stuck in Baker, 91 miles of Utah desert, and why mail is the lifeline out west Day 28
Memorial Day and Halloween, and what they leave out Eighteen years of Sierra snow records, the Colorado passes, and the start date you solve for Day 42
You are not locked in The hiker who met three weeks above 100 degrees in Moab and kept walking, in the other direction Day 56
From planning year to start line The whole plan in one piece, and what to put under your feet when you go Day 70

Delaware, free, in the first email

The complete Delaware turn-by-turn guide comes with email one. Every waypoint carries its coordinates, its elevation, and both mileages on the same line, how far you have come westbound and how far eastbound, so the guide reads the same whichever way you walk it. Under the turns sit the notes hikers left behind: where the camping is, which spot in Bridgeville will fill your water bottles, where a highway crossing turns dangerous, each one dated and signed by the person who walked through.

The same email hands you the live Gaia GPS folder for Delaware, so those waypoints sit on the map in your pocket. Setting Gaia up once is the whole learning curve, and it is the same setup the rest of the corridor uses.

Delaware is 44.2 miles of a 4,900-mile walk. The rest of the trail is mapped to the same depth.

Who this is for

Anyone with a coast-to-coast hike still ahead of them, at any stage from idle curiosity to a start date already circled. Section hikers get as much out of it as thru-hikers, arguably more: every section has two ends, you choose which one to start from, and the whole course is about the decisions that choice sets in motion.

No gear lists. No training plans. Six emails on the decisions that are specific to this trail and hard to answer from a road atlas.

Keep Planning

Hiking America is an independent navigation resource. This site is not authorized by, and has no affiliation with, the American Discovery Trail Society. Our routes are our own, developed and continuously verified through field research and hiker feedback. They are not the official route of the American Discovery Trail, are not derived from American Discovery Trail Society materials, and may deviate from the route marked with signage.