2 GET THE APPS
BEST FOR:
Those who don’t want to do any homework
Strava heatmaps, Komoot, and Trailforks. Download these three little beauties to your phone and you’ll get access to a wealth of data, showing where other people are riding. As each one does things a little differently, it pays to know all four.
Komoot is an enormous route planning and navigation app. Plan a ride by adding a start and end point to the website, and Komoot will build a route without you having to do any of the boring bits. You can search for specific waypoints or trails and add them in. The best thing about Komoot is just how vast it is, while features like Singletrack Scale (which reveal how technical a trail is going to be) to Trail View (users’ images of the trail itself) are genuinely helpful. It’s certainly a good option for building natural routes and sanctioned trails.
Strava is very definitely a social media site rather than a route guide, meaning you’re best off using it to see where others have ridden. Use heatmaps and segments to see which trails get the most traffic, and avoid the ones that get a few lost souls from way back in 2015. Strava’s KOM leaderboard is useful too because you can check out other trails the fastest riders are seeking out.
Trailforks is a great resource because there are over half a million trails listed on the site, and they’re all generated by riders and through real-world GPS info, which makes it a super-accurate resource. It’s free to use at home on your laptop, but you’ll have to pay
$1.99 a month if you want the info on your phone while you’re actually hunting for trails.