The new AllTrails wildfire overlay, and how trail activity data from Jasper, Tahoe, and Maui tells three different recovery stories.
We recently added a new overlay layer showing current wildfire perimeters to maps on AllTrails. It’s currently live on iOS and will be coming to Android by the end of July, available to everyone in the US.
Excited might be the wrong word for this launch. Fires are actively affecting real communities, homes, and trails across the world this summer. As the reality of wildfire becomes an increasingly bigger factor in recreation, we want to make sure that our community has access to wildfire data (and more) in the same place they’re planning to visit. The AllTrails Wildfire overlay brings active fire perimeters into the moment you’re deciding where to go, so you can understand the broader context, compare trails, and adjust your trip. We want you to be able to make more informed decisions about the actual trail or zone you’re heading to without piecing together information across separate sources.
Our trail data lets us look at what happens after the fire is out, trails reopen, and hikers return. What we see through that data is that recreation doesn’t recover on a consistent timeline. Sometimes trail use is back the next season, even bigger. Sometimes it parallels the recovery of nearby towns and services. And sometimes, fire can reshape how people travel to a place without long-term trail closures at all.
Jasper (July 2024) – a recovery limited by lodging, not burn damage
In late July 2024, wildfire forced roughly 25,000 people out of the town of Jasper in Jasper National Park. The fire eventually destroyed about a third of the buildings in town before being contained. Local residents were evacuated for almost a month, and the park stayed closed to visitors well past that.
For a mountain town whose economy is almost entirely reliant on outdoor recreation, that kind of closure is devastating. Businesses in Jasper lost as much as $4.5 million a day, according to an estimate from the Tourism Industry Association of Alberta, and visitors in the 2024/25 season were less than half of the year before. Some of that visitation appears to have shifted to Banff, where tracked activities on AllTrails had a measurable spike over the same period of time that Jasper was closed. We can’t say from our data alone that the two are connected, but it seems likely.
The park has largely re-opened, with a few exceptions, but summer 2025 AllTrails activity in Jasper was still ~14% below pre-fire levels. Part of the reason for that is a lack of hotel and housing inventory, which affects both visitors and local staffing. With fewer available places to stay locally, it’s been harder for visitors to visit Jasper.
Caldor Fire (Lake Tahoe, August 2021) – a season lost in Desolation Wilderness
The Caldor Fire started on August 14, 2021 near Grizzly Flats, CA and burned more than 200,000 acres of the Sierra over the next two months. South Lake Tahoe was evacuated, the Forest Service closed a number of national forests over the summer. No one ever put a (public) number on what all of it cost Tahoe tourism, but the impact was massive.
Desolation Wilderness, a popular hiking and backpacking zone near South Lake Tahoe, was one of the areas that was closed, and gives us an example of what recreation before and after looked like. The fire effectively closed Desolation Wilderness for the entire 2021 season, but visitation surged back, a “rebound” effect that shows up when fire-affected areas reopen.
Lahaina (Maui) – trail activity recovered faster than overall tourism
On August 8, 2023, a wind-driven fire destroyed the town of Lahaina on Maui’s west shore, killing over 100 people. It was the deadliest US wildfire in over a century, burned more than 2,000 structures, and displaced thousands of residents, many of whom are still in temporary housing. Much of the rebuilding effort has been deliberately community-first. The county is phasing out 7,000 vacation rentals to house fire survivors and a local land trust is buying parcels to resell to residents.
The fire didn’t occur in a wilderness area, but it had longer-tail effects on overall tourism and recreation patterns on Maui. None of the most heavily trafficked trails were closed, but visitor arrivals to Maui dropped 57% in August of 2023 and recovered slowly. Overall tourism to Maui still hasn’t recovered to pre-fire levels, but AllTrails activity on the island is above 2022 levels, even normalized for growth. Because the majority of trail recreation is centered around Haleakalā National Park and along the north and east coast (Lahaina is in the west), it suggests that more recreation-focused visitors returned faster than resort-focused ones.
What we learned
Trails reopened but visitors didn’t come back in the same way every time. Desolation Wilderness lost a season, but people came back en masse. Jasper is drawing people back again, but the slow recovery is related to lodging and access rather than the trails themselves. And on Maui, where no major trails were directly affected, trail activity has outpaced the broader tourism economy. The rebuild residents are pushing for is oriented toward the people who live in Lahaina, not toward raw visitor volume.
Before you head out this summer
- Use our new wildfire overlay while you’re choosing a trail. Keep in mind that fires can quickly change, and that air quality may be affected even if specific trails are not.
- Respect all closures and evacuation orders. Land managers close trails for good reasons, including keeping firefighting corridors clear.
- Come back when communities reopen. Places like Jasper, Maui, and countless others rely on visitors to recover. Returning, respectfully, is one of the most direct ways to help.
