How to find your longest hike of the year

The short answer

Export the year as a CSV file, open it in a spreadsheet, and sort — rather than sum — the column for whichever "longest" you mean: distance, moving time or elevation gain, largest first. Whatever sits in the top row once the file is sorted is the longest hike of the year by that particular measure. Scrolling back through a season of individual routes to spot it by eye works when there are only a handful to check; it gets unreliable fast once a year holds dozens of them, and a map thumbnail rarely communicates scale clearly enough to compare one against another at a glance.

Longest by what, exactly

Distance, moving time and elevation gain are three separate numbers, and a year of hiking can easily produce three different winners. A long, flat walk along a coast or a river can out-distance everything else in the file while barely registering on the elevation gain column, and take up a fairly ordinary number of moving hours for its length. A short, steep climb can do close to the opposite — modest distance, an elevation gain total that dwarfs every other hike in the year, and a moving time that runs longer than its distance alone would suggest, because steep ground is slower to cover than flat ground of the same length.

Neither hike is more entitled to the word "longest" than the other. Each is the longest by a different measure, and the honest answer to "what was my longest hike this year" is usually "longest by which of the three" rather than a single hike that wins on every count at once.

Sorting, not summing

Totalling a year of distance or elevation gain is a SUM formula over a whole column, because the question is "how much altogether." Finding the longest single hike is a different operation — sorting that same column from largest to smallest and reading off the top row, rather than adding every row together. A MAX formula would technically return the same top figure, but sorting is usually the better tool, because it hands back a full ranked list rather than a single number with the rest of the year hidden behind it — a close second place, or a hike that leads in one column while sitting well down another, stays visible instead of disappearing.

Checking whether it is the same hike across categories

Sort by distance first

Note the date in the top row. That is the longest hike of the year by ground covered, regardless of how long it took or how much climbing it involved.

Then sort by moving time

Check whether the same date is still at the top. If it is, that hike was the longest by two different measures at once, which is worth knowing. More often a different date takes the top row here — usually a shorter, steeper hike where covering less ground still took more time.

Then sort by elevation gain

A third sort, a third check. A hike that led neither of the first two columns can easily top this one, since a short, relentless climb can out-gain a long, gently rolling day without coming close to it on distance or time.

Why not just remember which hike was longest

Memory tends to fix on how a hike felt rather than on what its numbers actually were. A hike that stands out because of the heat, the company, or a wrong turn that added an unplanned detour is not automatically the one with the largest distance, moving time or elevation gain column — it is just the one that left the strongest impression for reasons that have nothing to do with those three figures. The hikes most likely to get mistaken for the longest of the year are exactly the memorable ones, which is not the same set as the ones the numbers actually back up.

Where TrailCam fits in

TrailCam records distance, moving time and elevation gain for every hike and exports the whole history as a single CSV file, with a column for each sitting next to date and activity type — so finding the longest one by any of the three is a sort in a spreadsheet rather than a search through the app's history by hand. Moving time in that export already has stops removed, since pausing is a deliberate tap rather than an automatic guess at your speed, so a sort by that column reflects time actually spent walking rather than time spent standing at a viewpoint. The same history exports as GPX 1.1 if the route behind whichever hike comes out on top is worth pulling up again. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.