Are there any substantive differences between the Hiking and Walking activities?

kneighbour said:

I am a Hiker and would like to use the Hiking activity, but I cannot. This is because in the android version of Garmin Connect the Hiking activity does not provide summaries and charts. Walking does.

Huh? Something must be wrong. I have the android version, and my Hike activity shows tons of summaries and charts. Just as many as the Walk activity. Try reinstalling the Connect app on your phone.

At any rate, there's no inherent difference between the two. They just have their default datascreens set up differently, but you can customize them to be exactly the same as each other.

You can even make a copy of the Walk activity, and rename it "Hiking", then you can still have a separate activity for walking and hiking.

What I did was exactly as you suggest - I copied the Walk activity and renamed it Hiking. Works just fine. I am happy with my current setup. But it would be nice to work it out 'properly' if that is possible.

I am looking at my Garmin Connect as we speak. If you drop down the Activities on the menu at the top left, what I see listed is

Steps
Walking
Running
Cycling
Swimming
Multisport
Gym and Fitness Equipment
All Activities
Floors
Intensity Minutes
Create Manual Activity.

There is no Hike type activity listed. So how can I display graphs and summaries for Hike (or Trail Hike) activities. If there is some way to add Hiking activities to this list, that would be great. 

For some reason if you go into edit on a given activity you can change it's type and in there you can select hike

So the problem is just finding the activity to view it, rather than there being nothing to see when you view it?

I don’t know why Hike isn’t in that list, and it’s annoying for me too. If you view all activities and scroll down until you find a Hike, tap on it and you’ll see all the charts you’d see with anything else. Also, scroll down within the activity page and you’ll see a link saying View All Hiking Activities, so once you’ve found one it is easy to see all of them.

The difference between one activity type and another is not just the text in the name, but also a binary code in the header, so that search might not do what you want if you have some activities with Hiking in the name but where the underlying binary header says Walk (I’ll have to check if the code is different but can’t do that right now, sorry)

Edited to add: yes, Hiking and Walking have different values for Sport in the file header

Another difference between the two activities is that walking is included in VO2 max calculations, hiking is not.  This seems like a strange distinction to me.  What I consider a hike is usually more strenuous than a walk.

https://support.garmin.com/en-US/?faq=ULj1XBUa9C5zxtPzhVcgkA#:~:text=To%20generate%20a%20Running%20VO2,the%20Running%20or%20Walking%20profiles.

It has less to do with how strenuous an activity is and more to do with variations in terrain - accounting for which makes calculating VO2m harder, as the watch needs to determine whether an increase in heart rate is due to extra effort or a climb in elevation, for example.

Walking is treated like running (which is assumed to be in mostly smooth/flat terrain and so contributes to VO2m) while hiking is treated like trail running (which is assumed to be in mostly rough terrain with significant altitude changes and so is not contributed to VO2m).

That said, trail running is reported to contribute to VO2m in the latest beta so I image they can use the same algorithms for hiking.

I suspect it's for the same reason that in the past road running was included in VO2 max calculations and trail running was not - it's more strenuous because the ground is more variable and technical & there's more ascent involved and they opted to leave it out rather than have it unpredictably depress your VO2max. I reckon they'd agree with you about which was more strenuous!

ETA: typed at the same time as acousticbiker's reply, totally agree.

@acousticbiker,  makes sense.