From tracking every inch of a trail they've hiked to ending a day outdoors with a different fun activity, members of the Appalachian Mountain Club have found many ways to spice up their hiking lives. Here is a sampler.

Redlining trails
Members of the Southeastern Massachusetts Chapter meet every Thursday night from April through October at Blue Hills Reservation south of Boston to work toward hiking every one of its 125 miles of trails. Called Red Line the Blue Hills, the effort involves hikers marking a map of the Blue Hills with a red pen as they complete each segment. Like those on a quest to hike all 48 of the 4,000-footers in the White Mountains, participants enjoy this pursuit because it is about setting a goal and, with dedication, achieving it.

"Everybody loves a project," says Cheryl Lathrop, the hike leader of Red Line the Blue Hills in 2008 and 2009. "People love this series. You can watch people walk around with maps and pen in hand."

Lathrop even created a website at which she has posted a map, complete with red lines, to indicate which trails the group has completed. She also tracks the attendance of all the participants. When someone completes the final segments, it's no surprise that it's a bit of an event.

"Whenever anyone finishes, we always take a break and make a big deal about it," says Lathrop, who finished in 2007, and is trying to hike every mile again. "A lot of us have a picture in which we're holding up our map with all the trails all red. It's kinda beaten up and it may have taken years."

Red Line the Blue Hills has been so successful that last summer members of the Southeastern Massachusetts Chapter began redlining the 77-mile North–South Trail that runs from the Massachusetts–Rhode Island border to the Atlantic Ocean. They expect to finish this summer.

"We're going to race into the ocean at the end of the hike," says Lathrop.

Following clues
Two other goal-oriented ways to spice up hiking are geocaching and letterboxing, which are essentially treasure hunts. Most letterboxers get clues to where weatherproof boxes have been buried by visiting a website such as www.letterboxing.org. Others find clues that people spread through word of mouth or hide at outfitters. Each letterbox contains a journal in which a letterboxer will indicate with a personal rubber stamp that he or she was there and may also leave some comments.

Geocaching is a more high-tech treasure hunt that incorporates the use of GPS. Geocachers go onto a website such as www.geocaching.com to learn the GPS coordinates of weatherproof containers, or caches, that have been hidden near a trail and typically contain a toy or trinket. A hiker who finds the cache can take the item but has to replace it with an item of equal or greater value.

"When I go out for a regular hike, it seems so boring when you aren't looking for something and don't have a goal in mind," says Janet Huntley, an avid letterboxer and a member of AMC's Narragansett Chapter.

Letterboxers and geocachers often put a personal touch into their pursuit. Letterboxers may create their own rubber stamps and geocachers sometimes leave behind books or music. Huntley, a dog lover, made a stamp of a Labrador retriever walking upright with a hiking stick and a bandana around its neck.

Making it social
Some AMC members seek out hiking partners with common interests off the trail. For example, for the past two years, people interested in home brewing have gathered for a weekend at the Mohican Outdoor Center in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area in New Jersey.

The event combines a day hike along the Appalachian Trail and a home brewing tutorial, led by Kathy Scranton and her husband, Dave, of AMC's Delaware Valley Chapter. It also includes savoring one or two of the beers that the Scrantons bring with them from their home outside Philadelphia. (The entire brewing process takes about a month.) Knowing that a hike of up to 10 miles will be rewarded with a tasty home-brewed beer with fellow connoisseurs adds a twist to the experience.

"Everyone who was there for the weekend had an interest in home brewing and beers," Kathy Scranton says. "It's a great way to start conversations, a great way to create fellowship. You have something in common."

For lovers of beer and history, Mason Logie of the New York-North Jersey Chapter has led long walks through New York City that have included visits to some of its most historic places, including McSorley's Pub. The city's longest continuously operated bar or restaurant, it opened in 1854 and was once visited by Abraham Lincoln.

Logie leads these walks periodically throughout the year, taking participants to different destinations each time. They have included Katz's Delicatessen, where a scene from When Harry Met Sally was filmed; the KGB Bar, formerly the site of the Ukrainian Communist Party's United States headquarters; and the Lenox Lounge in Harlem, where Miles Davis, John Coltrane, and Billie Holliday once performed.

"This is a way for people to still feel like they're doing something outdoorsy" without leaving the city, says Logie, who has been leading such walks for nearly a decade. "It's something people can do during the fall and winter where they can go out and warm up and be sociable."