HexaTrek Thru-Hiking Trail: Connecting Trails and Tech

Spanning across a vast swathe of France, HexaTrek, France’s newest and longest thru-hiking trail, is a relatively young thru-hike, with its first hikers walking its network of 54 connected trails in 2022. The thru-hike is 1,885 miles (3,034km) long, has 459,317 feet (140,000m) of elevation gain, includes six stages, goes through 14 National Parks, and is typically completed between four to six months. Its first year saw around 300 hikers complete the thru-hike, with the number doubling each year since its inception, making it rapidly stand out as one of Europe’s most sought-after thru-hiking trails.

However, since adopting a more active approach to its community on Strava and utilizing useful planning technology on Strava, HexaTrek’s numbers are quickly growing, with up to 900 hikers already signed up this year, roughly 30 percent of them coming from abroad to hike the trail, additionally, within two months, HexaTrek’s Strava Club grew to nearly 500 members.

Bringing HexaTrek to life

To truly bring the thru-hike to life and facilitate planning for hikers, HexaTrek’s team decided to use Strava’s interactive and dynamic routes, which were then embedded onto their website. “We integrated all the six route stages into Strava, which is really helpful for people in the planning stage of their thru-hike,” explains Kevin Ginisty, HexaTrek’s Founder. “I found out that integrating Strava’s routes and creating a Strava Club fit really well for our thru-hiking trail. Especially for documenting the hike after the fact, as well as while prepping the routes online beforehand. It creates a great notebook of your journey.”

The HexaTrek team took advantage of Strava’s route and embed tools. These allow thru-hikers to plan and picture their journey, including viewing the elevation profile, distances between sections, water access points, and images of each segment.

“When you’re planning your hike, it can be tricky because it uses your localization in order to calculate the distance from point to point,” Kevin emphasizes. “So now when people are using the map on Strava from their computer before going to hike the HexaTrek, they can clearly see the elevation curve, the road type, a picture of what to expect – so you have a better tool to use to prepare your trek.”

Building the HexaTrek community

“It also allow us to integrate the embed routes on our website, adding another service to our community,” Kevin adds.

On top of that, the team behind HexaTrek has fostered a strong and rapidly growing Strava community through regular posting on their Strava Club page, highlighting each stage of the thru-hike, and using detailed descriptions, routes and images. “A lot of people love to have the history of their hiking on the app, because the photos and trails are so well integrated that it easily becomes a beautiful social network.”

“Now, we have about 500 members in our Strava Club and they’re regularly posting about their HexaTrek journey on the Club page. The page also shows a ranking of how many kilometers and meters of elevation gain hikers in the Club are achieving each week – it’s great to see that happening almost as live action,” Kevin enthuses.