Walk Pittsburgh and light up the hills
FOG hides the entire world under fog and clears it only where your feet go. Pittsburgh gives you three rivers, a downtown wedge where two street grids collide, and hundreds of public staircases doing the work bridges do elsewhere.
Two grids, three rivers, a lot of steps
Downtown Pittsburgh is a triangle wedged between the Allegheny and the Monongahela, and it is built on two grids that meet at an angle along Liberty Avenue. Walk it and you feel the seam. Everything funnels toward Point State Park at the confluence, where the two rivers become the Ohio.
Outside the Triangle the city is hills, and the hills are steep enough that the street grid simply gives up in places and hands over to public stairs. There are hundreds of flights of them, city-maintained, with street names and signs, especially on the South Side Slopes and in Fineview and Troy Hill. Some of them are the only legal way between two streets. If you are used to flat cities, the first week here is a leg workout you did not sign up for.
Neighbourhoods are small, sharply bounded and each one has its own spine street. Butler Street in Lawrenceville, Walnut in Shadyside, Forbes and Murray in Squirrel Hill, Penn Avenue through the Strip District.
An afternoon across the rivers
Start in the Strip District early, walk Penn Avenue west into downtown, then cross the Allegheny on one of the three yellow sister bridges (Clemente, Warhol, Carson) to the North Shore. Follow the riverfront trail past the two stadiums to the Mexican War Streets and Allegheny Commons, then come back over and take the Smithfield Street Bridge to Station Square.
From there the Monongahela Incline hauls you up to Mount Washington, and Grandview Avenue gives you the view that ends up on every postcard. Walk the length of it and come down the Duquesne Incline or, if your knees allow, the steps. That loop is around eight miles and it lights up both riverbanks, the downtown wedge and the bluff in one go.
For a flatter day, the Eliza Furnace Trail runs from downtown out along the Mon toward Oakland with no road crossings at all.
Why the fog looks ragged here
Pittsburgh is satisfying to fill in because the neighbourhoods are small. Squirrel Hill or Lawrenceville can be genuinely covered in a few long walks, and city percent moves faster than in a sprawling grid city.
It looks messy though, and that is the terrain. Streets were laid out on paper and then dropped onto ridges and ravines, so they dead-end at cliffs, bend around hollows and reappear a hundred feet higher. Your revealed map ends up with torn edges and odd islands rather than clean blocks. The steps stitch some of those islands together.
Two practical notes. GPS gets vague in the valleys under the bluffs and in the shadow of downtown towers, so a line may wander a little before it settles. And winter here is grey, wet and long. January walking is a matter of gritted teeth. Autumn is the good season, when the hillsides turn and the humidity finally breaks.
How the app works
Every street starts hidden. You reveal it by physically walking, running or riding it, and once revealed it stays revealed. There is no check-in and no proximity credit.
There is no account, no sign-up, no cloud, no analytics, no ads and no tracking. The map never leaves your phone, and you can export your data. Background exploring keeps revealing with the app closed and the screen off, which is what you want when it is thirty degrees and the phone is in a coat pocket.
Exploring is free. One purchase of USD 5.99, with no subscription ever, unlocks unlimited ranks, every character and history import from Google Timeline exports and GPX files. Ranks go Wanderer, Scout, Pathfinder, Explorer, Voyager as your covered area grows. The collection runs to 241 countries, 3,390 regions and 7,342 named places, and the only way to collect one is to stand in it. For any city you have walked, FOG shows the percentage you have lit.
Questions people actually ask
Are the public staircases worth walking for this?
Yes. Many are the only connection between two streets, so they fill in gaps that the road network cannot. The South Side Slopes, Fineview and Troy Hill have the densest sets.
Will the hills mess up the tracking?
Elevation is not the problem. Narrow valleys under the bluffs and the downtown tower canyon can make GPS wander a little, but the line usually settles once you are back in the open.
What is the best single loop to start with?
Strip District to downtown, over a sister bridge to the North Shore, back across the Smithfield Street Bridge, up an incline to Grandview Avenue and along Mount Washington. Roughly eight miles.
Does the app work without a signal?
There is no cloud and no account. Revealing happens on the phone and stays there, and you can export it later.
Start with a dark map.
FOG is free to explore. No account, no subscription, and your map never leaves your phone.
free to explore · one purchase unlocks everything · never a subscription