I'm excited to see where this goes. You are right about the competition. There is tons of information out there, but not many are wiki and none have the responsiveness or a clean modern design yours does.

Kudos on the "free and open" promise! I hate logins.

Critique: - I second the suggestion to encourage contributing to OSM. Most popular hikes will be in OSM already and adding them to hike.io could be as easy as selecting the route on the OSM layer. - can you use a USGS layer for US locations? see mapper.acme.com - Adding an entry should be easier. I selected the coords, but was still required to enter the state, country. I would like to simply add a few points on a map and have the elevation/gain calculated for me - driving directions? why a block of text? why not a link to google driving directions?