A New Path to SuCCESS

AllTrails may have achieved the impossible-an app that truly helps you get away from it all.

- CHRIS GAYOMALI

Labor Day weekend, somewhere in upstate New York, about a two-and-a-half-hour drive from Brooklyn, where we live. A group of us-my wife, our toddler, and another couple-had rented a beautiful A-frame cottage in the woods. It's the kind of place that reinvigorates you, and makes you wistfully open a few Zillow tabs. On that morning, we wanted to sneak in an easy hike before lunch, so we fired up AllTrails, the go-to hiking app for outdoors enthusiasts. We wanted a specific set of conditions: a loop, preferably by a body of water, that was easy enough to do with a 2-year-old. After some swiping, we found a 1.4-miler with minimal elevation gain that was just 20 minutes away. One of us downloaded the map and off we went.

The parking lot was surprisingly crowded. We squeezed into a tight spot and walked down to the water, where local kids were skipping rocks in the general vicinity of some ducks. AllTrails instructed us to look for a water tower, where we were to head "downhill back toward the lake" and take the red trail "by the tennis and basketball courts" to find the path. We squinted down into our phones trying to decipher the directions, until one of us had the presence of mind to simply... look up. Aha. There it is.