[emodendroket]

Well, whether we mean the past century or the basically the entire existence of the United States, it's certainly much older than the GPS devices we're talking about, which was the sort of timeframe I had in mind when I said it is not a "fad." If we mean a couple hundred years then we could also call driving a car newfangled and faddish.

[ghaff]

Here is one set of stats showing significant growth in hiking from 2006 through 2019: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191240/participants-in-h...

This is consistent with other data I've seen.