How to Find a Hiking Buddy as an Adult

DEFINITION

Side-by-side activity

Activities where participants are engaged in a shared task rather than facing each other directly. Research suggests side-by-side formats reduce social pressure and produce more natural conversation than face-to-face settings.

You moved to a new city, or you’re in the same city and just realized your social circle has quietly thinned out. You want to hike. You’d rather not go alone. The question is how to find someone to go with.

This is a smaller problem than it seems, but it requires knowing where to look.

Why Hiking Works for Adult Friendship

Hiking is unusually well-suited to adult friendship for reasons that have less to do with hiking itself and more to do with how friendships actually form.

Friendships need three things: proximity (being near the same people repeatedly), time accumulation (enough shared hours for trust to build), and low-pressure interaction (contact that doesn’t feel like a performance).

A four-hour hike delivers all three in a single outing. You’re side-by-side for hours — not face-to-face across a dinner table, which creates social pressure. The shared physical challenge gives you something to talk about without having to manufacture topics. And because you’re moving, silences are comfortable rather than awkward.

Research on friendship formation shows that a casual friendship takes around 50 hours of shared time to form. A day hike gets you further along that path than a month of weekly coffee catch-ups.

Where to Find Hiking Groups

Meetup is the most reliable starting point in most cities. Search your city name plus “hiking” and you’ll typically find multiple active groups with varying difficulty levels. Most organize regular weekend hikes and are genuinely welcoming to new members — the whole point is to meet new people.

REI events — REI stores run free group hikes in most markets, usually led by staff or regular customers. These attract people who care about being outdoors and tend to be genuinely welcoming to newcomers.

AllTrails community — AllTrails has groups and a social layer. Less organized than Meetup, but useful for finding people who hike the same trails you do.

Local parks departments — Many city and county parks programs run guided group hikes, often free. These skew toward more casual hikers and families but are worth checking.

Sierra Club local chapters — Most large cities have Sierra Club chapters that organize regular group hikes. The demographic skews older but the hikes are well-organized and consistent.

Facebook Groups — Search “[city name] hiking” or “[city name] outdoor adventures.” These are often the most active for last-minute coordination and local trail knowledge.

Making the Most of Group Hikes

Finding a group is the easy part. Converting group hike participants into actual friends takes a bit more intention.

Show up consistently. The first group hike you attend, you’re a stranger. By the third, you’re a familiar face. By the sixth, you’re part of the group. The research on friendship formation is consistent on this point: repetition matters more than any single interaction.

Talk to people during the hike, not just at the trailhead. The first few minutes before a hike starts tend to be awkward. Once you’re moving, conversation becomes much easier. Ask about routes people recommend, about their experience with the trail, about what brought them to hiking.

Suggest a next hike. After a group hike you enjoyed with specific people, a message in the group chat saying “anyone want to try [trail] next weekend?” is completely natural and usually well-received.

When You Want a Smaller Group

Large group hikes (10+ people) are great for meeting people but less suited to building specific friendships. Once you’ve met people through organized groups, the move is to organize smaller hikes — three or four people on a trail gives you much better conditions for actual conversation than fifteen people spread across a mile.

Apps like Threvi are designed for exactly this: matching you with a small recurring group of people who share your interests and life stage. Instead of showing up to a large Meetup group and hoping for chemistry, you get placed with four to six people with similar interests and schedules, who meet repeatedly.

The recurring structure is the key difference. A one-off group hike can be enjoyable without leading anywhere. A recurring small group — same people, multiple outings — creates the conditions for friendship to develop.

The Difference Between Hiking Acquaintances and Hiking Friends

You can hike with someone ten times and still feel like strangers. What makes the difference is what happens between hikes: a message checking in, a shared trail recommendation, a quick conversation that isn’t about logistics.

The hike itself is the context. The friendship develops in the small moments around it. So while finding a hiking group solves the initial access problem, the actual work of friendship is in showing up consistently and being genuinely curious about the people you’re hiking with.

That’s not a complicated strategy. It’s just what friendship looks like when it’s working.