Great American Rail-Trail FAQ

A developing cross-country multiuse trail running more than 3,700 miles between Washington, D.C., and Washington State. It is a project of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy, which announced the preferred route in 2019. The route links more than 145 existing rail-trails and other multiuse paths, with road-based gaps still to be filled between them.

No. The eastern terminus is Washington, D.C., which sits on the Potomac, not the Atlantic. The trail runs cross-country, Washington to Washington.

If you want an ocean-to-ocean footpath, that is the American Discovery Trail, which reaches salt water at Cape Henlopen, Delaware and Point Reyes, California.

Twelve states plus the District of Columbia. From east to west: Maryland, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Nebraska, Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, and Washington. West Virginia's share is the shortest, a brief crossing at the Market Street Bridge near Steubenville.

About 2,085 miles, or roughly 56 percent of the route, according to the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy's most recent mapping analysis. The remaining 1,674 miles are gaps. New miles come online every year, usually in small increments, so the figure creeps upward each winter.

A gap is a stretch where the preferred route exists on paper but the trail does not exist on the ground yet. You connect the two ends yourself, almost always on public roads.

Some gaps are a few miles of quiet county blacktop. Others run for dozens of miles across open country with no shoulder and no water. There are roughly 80 to 90 of them. Gap routing is the biggest planning problem on this trail, and the main reason our GPS data exists.

Yes, in the Mountain West, where the gaps are worst and the road walking is longest. We maintain two.

The first leaves the preferred route in Wyoming and climbs into the Wind River Range, crossing toward Montana on trail rather than on highway shoulder. The second runs from Anaconda to Missoula, over the Skalkaho and down the paved Bitterroot Trail through Hamilton, Stevensville, and Lolo, roughly 134 miles.

Both are built for people on foot. Cyclists have the option of routing around the Mountain West gaps on paved highway. Walkers do not want that, and it is not what our tracks follow.

It is moving. The original line followed the Continental Divide Trail through Yellowstone. Bear closures and snow at elevation forced a change to a lower route in 2026, and the data still carries seams from that rework. We are cleaning it up in the off-season.

This is the difference between a map and a maintained route. A printed line cannot tell you the pass is closed. We can, because somebody is out there.

Both, though it was conceived and is usually described as a bike route. Bernie Krausse left the Capitol Reflecting Pool on March 28, 2026, walking westbound, and reached the Pacific at La Push, Washington, on August 3, 2026, completing what is believed to be the first known end-to-end foot thru-hike of the route. You can read his dispatches here.

Yes. Bernie Krausse completed what is believed to be the first known end-to-end foot thru-hike in 2026, walking westbound from the Capitol Reflecting Pool in Washington, D.C., on March 28 and reaching the Pacific Ocean at La Push, Washington, on August 3, 2026.

Cyclists have ridden the route for years. Nobody had established that it goes on foot.

Bernie Krausse finished the first known foot thru-hike in 130 days, averaging 25 to 35 miles a day. Treat that as the fast end, since he is a Double-Triple Crown hiker with more than 60,000 career miles. For most people, plan five to seven months on foot. At 20 to 25 miles a day with regular zero days, six to seven is realistic. A thru-ride is commonly done in two to three months.

Mostly, where it follows old rail grade. Railroads hate hills, so the built sections rarely exceed a couple of percent. The gaps are a different story, because road routing through Wyoming and Montana goes where the road goes.

Flat does not mean easy. Long, straight, shadeless days on crushed limestone punish feet in a way that mountain trail does not.

Everything from urban pavement to crushed limestone to ballast to gravel county road. The C&O Canal towpath is packed dirt that turns to mud. The Cowboy Trail in Nebraska is crushed limestone for most of its length. The Palouse to Cascades in eastern Washington runs loose and coarse enough that some riders walk sections of it.

Westbound hikers generally leave D.C. in late March or early April, which puts them across the Plains before the worst heat and into the Cascades before snow closes the passes. Eastbound riders often start in June, once the Idaho and Montana high country has melted out.

Both mountain crossings are the constraint. Everything else in the schedule bends around them.

More towns than you would expect, and longer stretches between them than you would like. The eastern half runs through a town every ten to twenty miles. West of the Missouri the spacing stretches, and in parts of Wyoming and Montana you are looking at motels, town parks, and whatever a friendly fire station offers.

Camping rules vary by trail manager and by state. Check before you assume.

In Nebraska and Wyoming, yes. Rail-trails do not come with water sources, and long exposed stretches with no reliable resupply are the norm across the Plains and Mountain West. Water points across the route were verified in the field during the 2026 thru-hike and are in the member waypoint set.

The GPX tracks for the full route are free. Create a free account and download them from our tracks page.

Curated services waypoints. We do not try to catalog every restaurant in Pittsburgh, because 200 pins is noise, not help.

Our waypoints cover what a person moving through on foot or by bike can actually reach from the trail corridor: food, resupply, lodging, water, and the gap-crossing details that keep you off a highway shoulder at dusk. Bernie Krausse verified and corrected all of it on foot between March and August 2026, roughly 10,000 waypoints across the full route.

The GPS tracks are complete and the services waypoints are now field-verified end to end. Bernie Krausse walked the full route between March and August 2026 and confirmed roughly 10,000 waypoints as he went. Turn-by-turn guides are still in development.

If you look at the map and think something should be there, tell us. That is how it gets better.

Yes. They are built for Gaia, which is what we recommend for offline navigation out here, and they will load in most other GPX-capable apps.

No. Hiking America is an independent navigation and planning resource. The Rails-to-Trails Conservancy builds and champions the trail. We build the GPS data and the guides that help people travel it.

The American Discovery Trail is an ocean-to-ocean footpath with a northern and a southern route option, running roughly 4,900 miles depending on which you take. It is older, rougher, and routed for hikers.

The Great American is a multiuse rail-trail corridor. Flatter, more bikeable, and still half unbuilt. We cover both. The ADT FAQ is here.