2020/10/25 by Brian Skinner, Skinner, Brian
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · #Complex Systems and Time Series Analysis #FOS: Physical sciences #Popular Physics (physics.pop-ph) #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2011.03332
openalex publication_date 2020/10/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The Appalachian Trail (AT) is a 2193-mile-long hiking trail in the eastern United States. The trail has many bends and turns at different length scales, which gives it a nontrivial fractal dimension. Here I use GPS data from the Appalachian Trail Conservancy to estimate the fractal dimension of the AT. I find that, at length scales between ∼ 20 m and ∼ 100 km, the trail has a well-defined "divider dimension" of ≈ 1.08. This dimension can be used to estimate the true hiking distance between two points, given the distance as estimated from a map with finite spatial resolution (e.g., Google Maps).