Generation SOS: Why young people are increasingly being rescued from mountains

By Maya Baylis and Jack Bantock, CNN

(CNN) — A stroll through Pepper Steps’ social media posts reveals all the hallmarks of a quintessential Gen Z influencer. But rather than showing makeup or skincare routines, this 27-year-old’s “Get Ready With Me” walkthroughs explore how to pack the perfect backpack and essential life-hack videos detail how to survive a bear encounter.

A full-time nature content creator known online simply as Pepper, the California-based “nature nerd” and her 550,000 strong-Instagram following are indicative of shifting demographics in the great outdoors, as young people increasingly make a pastime of humanity’s oldest physical activity: walking.

Traversing the trendiest mountain trails and documenting the experience is now a well-trodden path for online material, with hashtags for “hiking” and “hiking adventures” used up to 110 million and 11.8 million times on Instagram and TikTok respectively.

It’s a route that has paid dividends for Pepper, whose content proved so popular with her predominantly 18-to-25-year-old following that she was able to turn it into a full-time job just five months after starting to post videos in October 2024.

“It’s a healthy blend of nature education with outdoor education,” Steps tells CNN. “Learning about how to be outside and what is outside, and then also having as much fun as you can along the way.”

“I really do try and cover everything, down to how to lace your shoes properly,” she adds.

Gen Z’s increased interest in hiking has spawned some less desired consequences: local mountain rescue teams are feeling the pinch of a new, younger demographic of wayward wanderers that require saving.

Those aged between 18 and 24 are now comfortably the most likely group to call for rescue, according to an annual review released in May by Mountain Rescue England and Wales (MREW), the umbrella organization for 48 regional teams.

The 18-to-24 age group accounted for 18% of incidents in 2025 — twice the share of the next closest brackets, 13-to-17-year-olds and 25-to-29-year-olds, which each made up 9%.

With almost 400 callouts, 18-to-24-year-olds more than doubled their own 2019 tally, when the group was responsible for 166 incidents and ranked behind 50-to-54-year-olds.

Statistics from across the Atlantic Ocean painted an almost identical picture. Those aged 18-24 also led incident reports with an 18% share among more than 90 rescue units across North America last year, according to a data dashboard maintained by the Mountain Rescue Association (MRA), the oldest search and rescue organization in the US. As in the UK, the nearest age brackets were those directly on either side; teenagers were closest with 11%.

Three cases across a fortnight in July sketched an increasingly familiar story.

In the Lake District, England’s largest national park, a rain-soaked 16-year-old boy wearing one shoe stumbled alone down one of the myriad hills with thunder rumbling above him. His clothes caked in mud from falling in a bog, he sapped the last dregs of his phone battery to dial for help.

In Canada, three teenagers found themselves lost and dehydrated, with one significantly injured, in the rugged wilderness of British Columbia. The rapidly fading sunlight was about to put a greater strain on the navigational tool they were using to complete the challenging nearly 18-kilometer trail: a few sheets of printed Google Maps instructions.

In Colorado’s Sangre de Cristo mountain range, a 15-year-old boy slid uncontrollably some 200-feet down a snowfield. Relying on Google Maps to see him through a planned three-day solo hiking route, he had been attempting to retrieve a dropped backpack.

Hazards and honeypots

In all three incidents, disaster was averted by the swift response of local mountain rescue teams, but the incidents left a pressing question: why are those being rescued getting younger?

With more than two decades as a certified Mountain Guide in Canada, Mike Trehearne is well placed to answer. Having gained his professional qualifications in 2003, Trehearne is the managing director of Cloud Nine Guides, an Alberta-based service that runs mountain trips, programs and skills courses across the Canadian Rockies and beyond, from the Alps to the Arctic Circle.

While navigation apps, many of which allow users to share routes on social media, have improved, relying on them as catchall guides massively raises the risks of running into trouble, Trehearne explains.

“If that’s all you’ve got, it’s pretty much a certainty that eventually you’re going to find some hardship,” he tells CNN.

Social media has only further blurred the line between screen and reality, Trehearne says. Undertakings that would have seemed “incredibly abnormal” 15 years ago, like steep ski mountaineering in the Rockies, are now regular pieces of online content, “normalizing” routes that even he would deem complex.

These platforms have also supercharged the profile of hiking honeypot locations, a term borrowed from the travel industry describing a spot that attracts swathes of tourists, some of which — like the knife-edge Crib Goch ridge in North Wales’ Snowdonia National Park — require challenging scrambles to reach.

That trend is part of a broader story of digital influence that has contributed to an “endemic” lack of focus among an increasing number of Trehearne’s students.

“It is unbelievable,” he said. “They cannot be locked into their environment for more than 10 to 12 minutes without checking their phones.”

“When I started, it was about the calmness, the stillness, the connection to natural spaces, the people you were there with,” he adds. “But there’s a noticeable number of people now that are coming into these spaces so that they can curate social media feeds. Effectively the motivation becomes external validation that what they’re doing is cool.”

‘Interest is growing faster than experience’

Given her line of work, one might assume that Pepper would leap to social media’s defense, yet she takes pride in taking a different path to other creators in the space.

Similarly, Pepper does not blame navigation companions — popular apps like AllTrails have saved her more times than they’ve led her astray, she says. Yet she will never geotag or share the exact trail she has completed, only the rough area, to safeguard the location from an influx of visitors.

Some rescue organizations appear to see the popularity of educational content as a way to reduce the number of young people needing rescuing. In the last year, both MREW and Parks Canada collaborated with influencers to share responsible outdoor planning tips on their platforms.

The fact that rescue groups are engaging with content creators paints a more positive picture. At a time when alarm is growing about rocketing screentime among kids and teens, encouraging young people to use technology responsibly in the great outdoors could be preferable to them rarely being outdoors at all.

“I have truly fallen in love with the process of being outdoors and the entirety of the experience,” Pepper says.

“Reaching amazing summits or exploring these fantastical places is often inspiring, but the journey is just as important because you know that’s what you remember.”

The-CNN-Wire
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