About

Trailforks is a trail management system for outdoor enthusiasts, trail builders/associations, government and tourism. It aims to provide the very best tools to inventory, maintain, promote and showcase trail networks and tourism destination. Tools such as statistics empower each group to have accessible data to show local city councils, governments, tourism boards and parks, conveying the popularity and potential economic impact of outdoor recreation on their area in order to receive further support to grow trail networks.

The Trailforks App harnesses all this data and provides users with the best tool for planning their next destination and on-trail experience of navigation and safety.

Trailforks supports the following user groups: Mountain Biking, E-Bike, Hiking, Trail Running, Equestrian, Dirtbiking, Observed Trials, ATV/ORV, Snowmobile, Snowshoe, Downhill Ski, Backcountry and Nordic Ski.

Trailforks relies on the fact that there are thousands of people out there enjoying the sport every day, many of whom have a desire to share their experiences via GPS devices. So why not share them in a central location under a structure that makes every little individual contribution accumulate and add to the usefulness of an overall resource for the benefit of the entire mountain biking community.

Trailforks provides a multitude of features to help you discover the best trails & routes to ride around the world. From our recommended rides, ride planner, ride finder, heatmap, trail popularity, interactive map browsing, YouTube integration, trail reports, reviews, hundreds of thousands of photos and SO much more!

What is a crowd-sourced database? Trailforks is a site where users help grow and maintain the database by submitting new trails, updating existing trails, submitting reports on trails and logging their rides. Users can also add photos & videos which are tagged to trails found on the website. How is it controlled? Users also help moderate the site by voting or reporting content. But our prefered situation is to have local admins from the local trail association manage the content in their region. They know their trails the best and the intricacies of their local trail politics and relationship with land managers. Trailforks is largly built as a tool to assist these local trail associations which in turn creates good data for the everyday rider.

Pinkbike Announces Trailforks Article (Oct 16, 2014)

Why Trailforks?

Trailforks is a unique mix between a crowd-sourced and moderated site, built from the start with local trail associations & clubs in mind. Offering unique features and tools to help promote local clubs, business and trail supporters. Promoting clubs on trail and area pages, encouraging users to join or donate. We also promote local products like physical maps and guidebooks.

Trailforks provides a huge array of features and has access to a large amount of data & users from Pinkbike.

One of the primary reasons Trailforks was created was to free up limited time and resources of volunteer trail associations. So they won't have to worry about mapping IT systems, trail inventory, reporting and more. Instead they can use this free service and concentrate on the important advocacy and trail building work they do. Rather than thousands of clubs building there own systems duplicating effort, we can come together to create one central tool to serve everyone. We've worked closely with many associations with great feedback over the years to make Trailforks a better tool for their needs.

The organization of trails also differs on Trailforks, most trails are grouped into "riding areas" or "trail networks" which we believe is the most logical.

Trailforks is fast, powered by the Pinkbike data-center and created using the performance-focused Pinkbike framework that can handle millions of users. Unlike other trail websites, Trailforks is not cluttered and slowed down by advertisements!

At Trailforks we believe in access to data! Trailforks can empower outdoor clubs and associations. Allowing them to gain data from Trailforks for use on their own websites using our various widgets, rss & kml feeds and JSON API. We can also create custom embeddable widgets on request!

Trailforks Pro & Monetization

For the first five years Trailforks team has designed, developed, supported, and hosted these features and tools on their very own dedicated servers. Trailforks has provided this all while keeping the website and app 100% free from advertising, something we pride ourselves on and plan to continue doing long into the future.

At Trailforks we have been adding both significant features and users over the last five years and we have grown to a level that requires a contribution from our user base so we can continue to make Trailforks great. With our payment model we have tried to strike a balance between free access and payment. With the revenue from Trailforks PRO, we will be able to hire more staff which will allow us to create a better product, better support, and more features geared towards mapping and trail management.

We'd love for it to be free for everyone always, but it just wasn't possible. We've tried to come up with the best system we can to balance everyone's needs. The website and the tools for the associations remain free; most users can just use their free area, and for those that travel, need advanced features or want to support us, they can join Trailforks Pro and have full access everywhere. The map in the app is greyed out but still usable for basic navigation.

We also want to make Trailforks better and have many new features planned that we would like to create more quickly. By becoming a paid Pro member of Trailforks you will allow us to do this and support our current riders and associations better and build new features requested by users and associations.

To be clear, the website and access to maps and trail data remains free on the website. Only the map outside your free area in the Trailforks app will be greyed out unless you become a PRO subscriber.

Managing Trails / Sensitive trails

Riding communities have different policies regarding online trail data & unsanctioned trails. Trailforks has worked with local clubs to build in features to satisfy their needs. Trailforks has a permissions system that allows us to grant certain members with the ability to control all of the content under their region. Each trail association can decide what should be seen online. Trails have 3 levels of visibility; public, location hidden and hidden. more info

Structure

Trail information is stored in a hierarchy of regions allowing different parts to be reused and for the site to scale. Each region level shows all the content below it, making each region its own mini-site. The hierarchy looks like this:

Country -> Province -> Sub Region 1 -> Sub Region 2 -> City -> Riding Area -> Trail

Platform

Trailforks is designed to be a platform that local riding associations can use to help manage their trails and promote their events. Trail reports are a great tool for associations to keep a record of work done to trails and be notified when there are issues on a particular trail.

Trailforks can also be used to help manage & promote local Trail Supporter programs. Recording who sponsored a trail and when, who the trail builders are and who the land manager is.

Any data Trailforks generates can be shared with trail associations through RSS feeds, widgets, export tools and the Trailforks API.

Trailforks detailed content stats