I’ve been playing with the idea of creating a muni trail guide for my area (Oslo, Norway). There are a few such guides/maps for mountain biking already, the best being mtbmap.no and trailguide.net, but a good MTB trail isn’t necessarily a good muni trail – at least at my (low) skill level. Does anyone know of muni guides for other parts of the world?
The easiest option would be to use some established website, such as alltrails.com, and just upload trails there, but I haven’t found a website where it’s possible to filter for muni trails. A downside is that those websites tend to be commercial, and you would risk losing everything if they go bankrupt.
What software would be easiest/best for the purpose? The underlying software (e.g., OpenStreetMap, Google Maps, etc.) would have to be fairly simple to adapt and set up on a server. The mtbmap.no software seems reasonably simple to set up. I would also have to establish a classification system (difficulty, quality, etc.), or adapt one from a MTB system, such as this one.
Coming from the person that uses his iphone as a walkman and a camera, I would put the mouse down and just start riding.
It seems like you’re trying to come up with a solution for something that isn’t actually a problem
Bring your skill level up to be able to ride anything.
A well made MTB trail is exactly the trail you want.
It’s already made, it’s been refined, and will keep the attention of the public for future maintenance.
So why isn’t a green rated trail necessarily a good muni trail?
Due to work and family I only have a limited amount of “play time”. I would rather spend that time riding some quality assured tracks than having to get off and walk through root gardens every 20 meters for several kilometers. Riding with other people is of course an alternative, but that requires some planning.
Of course I’d love to just be better, but that will take some time.
I don’t know what it’s like in your area, but here MTB trails aren’t “made” or “maintained”. They’re just hiking tracks in the woods around the city. Taking the wrong turn at an intersection can quickly get you into boggy, rocky, rooty, hilly terrain.
In my experience MTB or hiking maps work well, especially if you use something like komoot in addition where there are quite often some good descriptions and pictures for each trail. I agree that MTB difficulty doesn’t always translate well to unicycles, but having 3-4 (at most) unicyclists in an area rate trails isn’t going to be better than the collective feedback from hundreds of bike riders you can get on a larger platform.
Also trails change, I have a trail that is medium difficulty in winter with hard ground, but near impossible to do in summer. Or trails that disappeared completely due to plants growing over it. Even if all Muni riders in my area were contributing to a trail map, those changes probably wouldn’t be updated for weeks.
I think komoot with some extra attention and embracing that there will be unforeseen challenges no matter how careful you plan is your best bet.
Thanks for your input! I should say my ambitions aren’t very big. It would be nice with some easy way to record and share notes on good trails with others, that’s all. That can probably be done with some low-tech linking to MTB maps.
I always figure that I can walk as much of the trail as necessary if parts are too hard for me. I don’t mind riding trails over and over so long as they challenge me, so I tend to learn which ones are too easy, which ones are too hard and which ones are just right, and most importantly how they interconnect.
The lowest tech solution would be to record the ride and share the GPX file (a lot of MTB sites do that). Then with a pic of the distance/elevation profile and a quick notation using define muni criteria and voilà!
Storage can be done on this forum wiki (if there is one) or a sub-section that would gather GPX for an area.
After, you can be more ambitious and have a commercial solution accept muni as a separate discipline or create a website that will host the GPX file and preview it on a map and with the elevation profile… But that may take time that could be spent riding
Good idea! I think I’ll go for something like this. I have a HTTP server where I can play with some PHP/XML and embed OpenStreetMap maps. I’ll report back if I find a workable solution.
