How to total your hiking distance for the year

The short answer

Export your recording history as a CSV file, open it in whatever spreadsheet program you already have, and sum the distance column. That single number is your total for the year. If the app groups activity types together — hiking, running, cycling, and whatever else you have used it for — filtering the activity column first gives you a total for hiking alone rather than everything combined.

This works because a CSV export is a summary, not a route. Instead of the thousands of coordinate points a single walk produces, it holds one row per walk: the totals a GPX file never states outright.

What a CSV export actually gives you

A GPX file preserves the shape of a route, point by point, but it never states "this walk was 14.2 kilometres" anywhere in the file — a mapping tool has to calculate that by measuring the distance between every pair of points and adding it up. A CSV export skips that step. It is normally one row per recorded route, with columns for date, activity, distance, duration and elevation gain, already calculated and ready to read.

That difference is exactly why CSV, not GPX, is the right format for this job. A route file is built to be walked back through on a map; a summary table is built to be added up. Getting a yearly total out of a folder of GPX files means opening each one and copying a number out by hand, which is the kind of task a spreadsheet exists to remove entirely.

Adding it up, filtering and sorting

Summing the distance column

Once the CSV is open, a single formula does the work — a SUM over the distance column in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets adds every row in one step, whether that is thirty walks or three hundred. There is no need to separate the file by month first; the total for the year is just the sum of everything in the file.

Narrowing it to one activity or one month

A filter or a pivot table on the activity column separates hiking from anything else the same history contains, and a filter on the date column narrows the same total down to a single month or season. Both are standard spreadsheet operations that work the same way on this data as on any other table — there is nothing hiking-specific about them.

Sorting to see the shape of a year, not just the total

Sorting the same rows by distance surfaces the longest and shortest outings without hunting through a route list by eye. Sorting by date instead turns the file into a simple timeline — useful for noticing that most of a year's distance came from a handful of long weekends rather than being spread evenly, something a single yearly total cannot show on its own.

Why not just add the numbers up by eye

Because the error rate for mental addition across dozens of numbers is high enough to make the result unreliable, and because every route you forgot to include or counted twice quietly shifts the answer with no way to check it afterwards. A spreadsheet total is the same distance figure the app already calculated for each walk, just added up mechanically instead of from memory.

The other reason is that a year-end total is rarely the most interesting number on its own. What tends to matter more is the shape underneath it — whether the year was front-loaded into a few long trips or spread across many short ones — and that only comes from having every row in one place to sort and filter, not from a single figure tallied by hand.

What TrailCam does

TrailCam can export the whole route history as a single CSV file in one action, alongside the same history as GPX 1.1 if the route shapes themselves are ever needed. Each row carries the activity type — hiking, running, cycling and eight others, or one you named yourself — so a total for one kind of outing is a filter away rather than a manual sort through the list. Export is part of the optional TrailCam Pro upgrade; the app itself is free to download.