Does crossing midnight during a hike split it into two days?

The short answer

No. A recording is a single continuous session bounded by the moment you tell it to start and the moment you tell it to stop, and the calendar date has no part in either of those two events. Whether the walk runs from 11:40pm to 1:15am or from 11:40am to 1:15pm makes no difference to how it is recorded — the same points, the same timestamps, the same one distance and one duration at the end. The date rolling over underneath a hike that is still running changes what the clock says, not how many hikes you did.

What actually starts and ends a recording

A track only ever ends because you ended it — by stopping the recording, the same deliberate action that closes out any hike, short or long, daytime or overnight. Pausing does not end it either; a paused recording is still the same open session, just not adding new points while it is paused, ready to pick back up from exactly where it left off. Nothing about the clock reaching midnight belongs on that list of things that stop a recording. It is simply not one of the events the app is listening for, so a hike running straight through it is treated no differently than a hike running straight through any other minute of the day.

This is the same logic behind pausing overnight on a multi-day backpacking trip and having the whole thing come back as one continuous route rather than several — a recording keeps being the same recording across a break in the clock unless something actually tells it to stop. Crossing midnight during a single unbroken walk is that same situation at a much smaller scale: nothing tells the recording to stop, so nothing does.

Why the numbers underneath do not care what date it is

Distance, moving time, pace and elevation gain are all built by comparing the timestamp on one recorded point with the timestamp on the next, over and over, from the first point to the last. Every one of those timestamps is a single absolute instant, the same kind of reference a GPX file uses for exactly this reason, and comparing two instants to find the gap between them has no step in it that asks which calendar date either one happens to fall on. The point recorded one minute before midnight and the point recorded one minute after it are, as far as that arithmetic is concerned, just two points one minute apart — indistinguishable from any other minute-apart pair in the whole route.

A date is a label people find useful, not a unit the underlying math is built from. Changing the label partway through a sequence of points does not insert a gap into the sequence itself.

What you would actually see if you looked

Open the raw file from a hike that crossed midnight and the timestamps do change their date component partway through, the same way they would show a time zone offset changing on a trip that crossed one — a string printed next to each point, not a break in the list of points itself. The line on the map does not have a seam at the spot where that happened, because there is nothing in the route's shape or spacing that corresponds to a date changing. It is exactly as continuous there as anywhere else on the walk.

Where the confusion usually comes from

• Expecting a hike list to work like a calendar, with one row per date — most hike histories are organised by when a recording started, so a single entry that happens to straddle two dates is normal, not a sign something split.
• Mixing this up with a deliberate multi-day trip, where stopping the recording each evening and starting a fresh one each morning is a choice you made on purpose, and is what actually produces separate entries for separate days — a midnight crossing inside one unbroken recording is a different situation entirely, because nothing was stopped.
• Manually tallying a night hike by writing down a start time and an end time and subtracting them as if both were on the same clock face — the recorded duration is not built this way, so it is unaffected even if a hand calculation done afterward gets confusing.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam keeps recording in the background for as long as a route is running, whether that stretch of time sits entirely on one calendar day or crosses into the next, and reports one distance, one moving time, one pace and one elevation gain for the whole session either way. A hike that starts before midnight and ends after it is saved as a single entry, the same as any other walk. TrailCam is free to download; GPX 1.1 and CSV export are part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade.