How do you ascend to the Triple Crown? We surveyed the finalists to find out

doCompleting the Triple Crown of hiking means hiking three of the longest trails in North America: the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, and the Continental Divide Trail. Most people would consider completing even one of these a once-in-a-lifetime experience, as each requires a significant investment of time and money.

Fewer than 800 registered people have completed all three, a total distance of nearly 8,000 miles. How did they make it possible? We surveyed 82 Triple Crown participants about everything from their favorite of the three trails to how much money they spent in total to what advice they would give to someone hoping to one day finish the Triple Crown.

In this first installment of the Triple Crown Survey, we look at the high-level makeup of our Triple Crown hikers, including demographic information, trail timing, and hiking style.

The Demographics of Triple Crown Hikers

First, let’s delve into the demographics of our 82 respondents, including their gender, age, hometown, and how long their journey to the Triple Crown took them.

Triple Crown Hikers: Gender

Men make up the vast majority of Triple Crowners, and nearly 70% of our respondents identify as men. This is pretty consistent with our 2025 Appalachian Trail survey, in which 63% of our respondents identified as male. Hiking remains a male-dominated sport, and the percentage of men who hike the Appalachian Trail hasn’t fluctuated much in our survey over the past decade.

However, the Continental Divide Trail has seen a marked increase in the percentage of women on the trail, rising from 32% to 40% since 2019 at Halfway Anywhere. survey. Since the Triple Crown is such a monumental undertaking, typically taking many, many years to complete, changes to the demographic information of a single trail may take a while to be represented across the entire Triple Crown.

How old are most Triple Crown hikers?

The average age of hikers at the start of the Triple Crown was 31 years old, while the average age at the end of all three routes was 38 years old.

First, we asked our Triple Crown hikers how steady they were when they began their trek. Large jumps in the data can be seen between the hikers’ 20s and 30s, as well as a final jump again between the hikers’ 50s and 60s.

This trend remains consistent with what we typically see in hikers. People in their 30s, 40s and early 50s tend to have more professional and family obligations in their home countries, so they tend to be less represented in route data.

The hiker who reported the youngest initial age (3 years) was a section hiker who began his trek on the PCT and completed the Triple Crown over the next 30+ years. The youngest hiker reported that he began his Triple Crown journey at age 11 on the PCT and finished at age 14 on the AT. It should be noted that this hiker completed the Triple Crown with his family.

Interestingly, the starting age of hikers who would complete all three trails (31) was significantly younger than the average age of hikers in our annual AT survey (44 in our 2025 data). This suggests that hikers who begin their first long hike at a younger age may be more likely to complete all three trails. That said, many hikers in the Triple Crown survey started and ended their hikes well into their 30s.

The final ages of our Triple Crowners do not fall as clearly into the age peaks we see in the initial data. Many hikers started and finished their Triple Crown in their 20s and 30s, but many others took much longer. Despite the typical pressures of those in their 30s and 40s that often prevent hikers from starting trails, Triple Crown hikers in that age group were much more likely to continue toward the goal they had already started.

The average age of our Triple Crown hikers when they finished their third hike was 38 years old, just 7 years older than the average starting age of 31. Our two oldest starting hikers (65 and 68) finished their Triple Crowns at ages 76 and 74, respectively.

Triple Crown Hikers: Hometown

Next, we asked our Triple Crowners where they had traveled from to complete these trails.

82% of the Triple Crowners in our survey came from the United States. The rest of what we heard was pretty scattered: three hikers from Canada, two from Germany, and two from the UK, and then six other countries representing a single hiker.

This makes intuitive sense, given the financial and logistical hurdles faced by international hikers traveling to the United States once, let alone multiple times. Trek readers are also primarily located in the US, potentially biasing our data set toward American hikers who were more likely to view our survey.

Within the United States, we saw a much more diverse geographic background. The states in yellow (Massachusetts and Oregon) were home to five hikers each. The states shown in blue in the graph above each had four respondents, while the gray states represented three hikers, the green states two, and the purple states only had one hiker each.

Interestingly, many of the most answered states (Alaska, Florida, Texas, and Ohio) do not contain a portion of any of the Triple Crown trails.

Triple Crown Hikers’ Trail Options

When faced with a challenge of this magnitude, you have many options. We asked Triple Crowners about some of theirs: what order they chose to hike the trails in, how long it took, and whether they chose to hike across, section, or opt for a combination of the two.

Triple Crowners were more likely to start on the AT and finish on the CDT. By the numbers, 59% of our respondents chose to hike the Appalachian Trail first, 50% hiked the Pacific Crest Trail second, and 63% finished their Triple Crowns on the Continental Divide Trail.

A significant minority (36%) chose to start with the Pacific Crest Trail. Our smallest demographic is the 5% of first-time hikers on the Continental Divide Trail, and only four respondents gave that answer.

Next, using data on the start and finish ages of our respondents, we analyzed how long the journey to the Triple Crown took. One respondent completed the calendar year Triple Crown in 2024, taking just one year to finish all three trails. At the other end of the spectrum, a section of people walked all three trails for 42 years, returning year after year to tackle different pieces.

On average, we saw the Triple Crown take between five and six years, although the most common answer was three years, with 13 hikers hiking all three Triple Crown trails in consecutive years.

Finally, we asked our hikers if they had completed their Triple Crowns as hikes or sectional hikes. The majority (79%) reported completing all three trails as hikes, only 2% completed all trails as section hikes, and 17% completed a combination of the two.

The low number of hikes per section makes sense when you begin to conceptualize the logistical dedication required. These three trails extend throughout the country, and each of them covers (almost) the entire length.

While a section hiker may not need to quit his or her job to take a trip, traveling across the country many, many times over the course of many, many years to achieve the Triple Crown is a level of dedication that many would not share.

Conclusion

That’s all we have for now on the demographics of the Triple Crown, but we have a lot more to discuss! In upcoming articles, we’ll take a look at the Triple Crowners’ favorite and least favorite trails, the best gear for the Triple Crown, how much it costs to hike all three trails, and much more.

If you have any comments, let us know in the comments! A big thank you to the Triple Crowners who took the time to complete this survey – we couldn’t do it without you.

Cover image: Graphic design by Chris Helm.