Trails.com review
I admit it - I’m a bit of an outdoor guide junkie - I probably own at least 50 mountain biking books. It’s not just guide books either - I love maps, pamphlets, any media for that matter that talks about mountain bike treks, backpacking routes, hikes, camping spots, etc. Surprisingly it has taken me a long time to give Trails.com a try but they finally got me with an offer I couldn’t refuse: a 1-year, 50-trail membership for just $24.95.
It seems like recently Trails.com was charging around $30 a year for membership and you only got to download 5 trails or so and additional guides cost $1.99 (though I could be completely wrong about this). The 50 for $25 deal made alot more sense for me because I am accustomed to paying roughly $12 for FalconGuides with around 30 or so trails (10 of which I would actually be interested in reading about). So the price seems right and even the regular price of $50 a year for 50 trails is reasonable if you do a good bit of outdoor traveling.
The Trails.com interface is fairly straightforward, although the state activity maps are a little tough to use (no way to zoom in and tiny dots representing trails that get jumbled together in popular locations). All the trails are geo-coded to show you the closest town to a particular trail but the coding seems inconsistent and just plain wrong in many cases. For example, Cades Cove Loop Road (biking) is listed as being located in Cherokee, NC but actually it’s on the Tennessee side of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park near Gatlinburg. This might seem like a minor oversight but driving from Cherokee to Gatlinburg will take you the better part of an hour.
Trails.com also lets you sort activities by the most popular attractions for a given activity in a given area. This seems to be pretty good for certain areas (Tsali, for example, is the best of mountain biking in Western North Carolina) but you get strange results for other areas (UNC Wilmington is the best mountain biking in the state of North Carolina?). Clearly the rankings are based on the popularity of trail guides on Trails.com and if the average Trails.com user isn’t you then these rankings won’t help you much. If I had to guess (based on the rankings) Trails.com users are suburban families who enjoy mild outdoor activities - not necessarily experienced, rugged outdoor types looking for adventure.
Which brings me to my next point: Trails.com is only as good as the published guidebooks they use for content. Trails.com is basically an iTunes for outdoor books - you can buy single digital trail descriptions online without having to buy an entire (printed) outdoor guidebook. As such, you’re pretty much at the mercy of what is available in print (which I’m personally often disappointed with). Take the Mountain Biking Colorado Springs FalconGuide for example. There are at least a dozen trails in the book that don’t go anywhere near singletrack, sticking instead to gravel roads open to vehicular traffic. The reason these trails get written up is to fill out an entire book (otherwise there just aren’t enough trails in Colorado Springs to make it worth publishing). So, despite the fact that the content is freed from the bounds of physical binding, the chaff remains online making it difficult to find the best trails.
At times Trails.com is just plain confusing. I’m a big fan of Jim Parham’s series Off the beaten Track and I was excited to find his book listed on Trails.com. I previewed some of his trail descriptions and was stoked to use one of my 50 downloads to see what Jim had to say about a trail in Tennessee. But wait - where was the “buy” button? Did I miss something? Nope, for some reason Jim Parham’s books aren’t available for download, they are just there to tease then frustrate you. I also read that in addition to the free topo maps a Trails.com membership promises, there is also GPS data available for download. I’ve yet to find this part of the site despite the simple online layout.
Purchasing a trail guide is easy and you get a fair amount of information on the trail summary pages. These pages give a paragraph describing the trail and you can decide to purchase based on the summary. Once you “purchase” a trail it is saved in the My Trails section of the site for quick retrieval at a later time.
The purchased trail guides themselves are presented very well and the online viewer has worked flawlessly for me. You can’t download the guides since they “expire” once you membership is up but you can print the guides and view them as many times as you like while your membership is in effect. The guides also come with helpful “additional pages” from the books to help explain symbols used on maps or to give you information about the author. Viewing online is not ideal so you’ll probably want to print the guides purchase for easier reading.
Trails.com offers a good service if you do alot of outdoor trekking but aren’t interested in purchasing entire guidebooks. But if you’re looking for specific trail information, your best (and cheapest) bet is to turn to Google because you’ll often find information, photos, and reviews (and sometimes even maps) of popular trails from local enthusiasts who know the trails best.
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