Can you record two hikes at once on the same iPhone?

The short answer

A GPS recording session is a single unbroken thread: start, a string of points logged one after another, then save. There is no second thread running in parallel inside that same session, which is another way of saying there is no second route to switch into while the first one is still going. Pausing and resuming is part of that one session — a paused stretch is still the same recording, just with a gap in it — but starting a genuinely separate route means the first one has to end first.

Why one session, not several

A recording in progress owns exactly one thing: the current position stream coming from the phone, matched against the current elapsed time, building one track as it goes. Elevation, distance and pace are all worked out against that single stream, and none of them mean anything applied to two routes at once — a distance figure has to belong to a specific line on the map, not to two overlapping ones. Rather than a limitation someone had to design around, this is closer to what "a route" is to begin with: one continuous line, not a set of them sharing a start button.

Where this actually comes up

• Driving or riding to a trailhead and wanting that leg kept as its own recording rather than folded into the hike that follows.
• A multi-sport day — biking down after a hike, say — where the two halves genuinely feel like different activities and deserve different labels and colours on the map.
• Two people going out with only one iPhone between them, each wanting their own saved route rather than one shared track credited to whoever was holding the phone.

None of these actually need two recordings running at the same instant. They need the boundary between two routes to land in the right place, which a single active session can still give you, just not at the same time as another one.

What to do instead

For a drive or ride before the walk, stop and save the recording at the trailhead, then start a fresh one for the hike. That gives two clean, separately labelled routes instead of one track that needs the driving trimmed out of it afterward. If the split already happened by accident — a recording paused at the wrong moment, or a hike that got cut into two pieces by a restart — two saved GPX files can be joined back into one afterward, which fixes the accidental split without needing a live second session to have existed in the first place.

For two people who want two separate hikes from one outing, one iPhone genuinely cannot give each of them their own live recording at the same time, because that phone has exactly one GPS session running. The only way around that is two phones — or taking turns, if the walk is one that allows for it — since a single device recording a single route is the actual constraint, not a setting waiting to be found.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam keeps a recording going while the screen is off or you are in another app, and lets you pause and resume freely without losing what you have recorded so far — paused time just stays out of the moving time shown afterward. If a recording is ever interrupted mid-walk, TrailCam offers the unfinished route back to you when you return, rather than starting over. All of that lives inside the one active session a phone can run at a time; a second, independent route needs either that first one saved and a new one started, or a second phone. Two phones signed in to the same account will each sync their own hikes to the cloud, so both end up in one shared history afterward as two separate entries, even though each was recorded live on its own device. TrailCam is free to download; cloud backup is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade.