wwTrails stands for World Wide Trails Archive. This is a website built with an ambition – to archive and make public every hiking or mountain biking trail around the world.

Throughout history, before the arrival of cars and before paved roads became necessary, people would use trails to travel from place to place. When cars were introduced and paved roads became a necessity, the rank of trails in the list of human necessities dropped and utilizing trails for traveling purposes declined. Because cars are too large for trails, trails were pushed aside and forgotten – all until the modern age, the late 20th century, when human beings figured out how to make bread faster and had found more free time in their hands.

Another phenomenon was created as people lost their will and motivation for walking and human habitats became limited to where ever paved roads reached: Large geographic segments became inaccessible and were left to be forgotten in the loving hands of nature and wilderness.

As the human race progressed, a need for physical activity arose, and a new recreational culture evolved: Different types of activities that at earlier times were considered a basic life necessity came about, this time for recreational and health reasons: walking from place to place became hiking, and riding a bicycle to the nearby fair become mountain biking or road biking.

As both activities developed, it translated to a market demand, and new equipment arrived to the market: Hiking shoes that were only available for elite units in the army became common on trails, and high technology mountain bicycles evolved from the basic bicycle which was utilized for riding to work.

By the end of the 20th century, more and more people got involved in recreational activities seeking fun and better health, and today one can find many popular trails crowded with brave hikers and warrior mountain bikers at every sunny weekend and many weekdays as well.

As mankind’s horizon widened and traveling long distances with cars became an everyday thing, nature lovers started to widen their recreational territory, looking for more adventures on new trails.

As thirst for new trails and paths grew among hikers and mountain bikers, different websites about hiking trails and mountain biking trails evolved and offered, each in its own unique way, information about trails and paths for hiking and biking around the areas in which the website builder lives.

Most those websites were built by trails lovers, riders, and hikers who did the job for their own pleasure and fun.

Trails information for the knowledge thirsty population of hikers and bikers became dependent on the talent of those weekend webmasters who built and maintained thousands of websites, each presenting information about trails in various ways..

Finding information about new trails, getting the sense whether it is worth it to drive there or not requires lots of time and somewhat talent in searching the Internet…

This is where http://www.wwTrails.org becomes handy: The website is designed to provide comprehensive and clear information for the relief trail lovers, hikers, and mountain bicycle riders.

In short, wwTrails.org was built to cover all aspects of trails information so rider and hikers can easily find and access new trails out of their everyday territory.

The source of trails in wwTrails.org: Gathering information about trails is a complicated task on its own; Many trails are known only to local residents who live nearby and have little or no motivation to share that trail’s information on the Internet.

Luckily for all of us, many hikers and mountain bike riders find it fun and useful to record and share their experiences on the trails with others. They gladly upload their trails and pictures everywhere they can: Social network websites as well as in wwTrails.org. and that is the main source of the trails stored in the wwTrails.org database.

The website offers a simple way to record and document trails by either uploading GPX files or manually drawing the path on a live map.

The website also allows the creation of picture galleries so visitors can share their trail pictures with others.

The wwTrails.org in details:

wwTrails.org offers several unique features on its pages, and I’ll start with the most advanced and astonishing one: The ability to take a helicopter ride over the desired trail.

The prime purpose of wwTrails.org is to provide its visitors, who are trail lovers seeking new trails, the sense of whether they want to ride or hike a trail they see in the website or to keep searching. To achieve this goal wwTrails.org takes a visitor on a “helicopter ride” over the trail in question: This is virtually a mountain bike ride or a hike over a trail, and available on every one of the tens of thousands of trails in the website. Furthermore, when one picks a trail or path in a city and takes that helicopter ride over it, one may see buildings, bridges, and monuments in that city along the trail’s path.

 

Finding trails for the next trip or vacation is complicated: Ordinary websites produce lists of trails as their search results, allowing one to filter the list by statistic data such as length, altitude gain, and difficulty level, omitting from the list the most important trail information: The starting point on a map and the path itself. Designers of those trail lists also ignore the fact that many trails may start from the same trailhead: More often than not, two trails that start at the same trailhead would be placed in two different pages leaving visitors no way of knowing that at the same point where their chosen trail starts, there may be other trails that are just as interesting.

wwTrails.org helps finding trails in a new unfamiliar territory in an innovative way: It allows visitors to pan and zoom a live map until they see the area that they are willing to drive to from wherever they are staying. The website then shows all trailheads in the visible area on the map. When visitors hover the mouse over the trailhead, a list of all trails appears, helping the visitor decide if he/she wants to click on that trailhead or continue on to the next trailhead icon.

When visitors click on a trailhead icon, wwTrails.org takes them to the trailhead home page, instantly showing a map with the first trail that starts at that trailhead. wwTrails.org also shows in a sidebar a list of all trails and their lengths, and visitors can click on either trail and see its path, mile stones, and point of interest.

 

Every trailhead has four information pages: Home page, Trails page, Image Gallery page, and after ride page.

The home page for a trailhead shows general information about that trailhead. Visitors find their trails list, a text box in which visitors can enter their location and get driving directions to that trailhead, and comments from other visitors who used or know that trailhead and have entered their experiences at this location.

The Trails pages shows list of all trails that start from that trailhead, and a map with the path, trail’s elevation chart, mile stones, point of interests, and images taken at that trail. Visitors can click on either trail in the list and have the trail’s path be shown on a live map. Users can see every picture taken at the trail’s area, all mile stones of that trail, and point of interest. Mile stones are snapped to a point on the path, have distance from start on them, and are designed to give instructions, like “Left here” or “Watch downhill” and so on. Point Of Interest could be paced anywhere, and are designed to draw attention for objects and interesting points around the trail’s path.

The Picture Gallery provides a place for image galleries of the area and trail starts at the trailhead location. It shows thumbs with reprehensive pictures from the gallery. By clicking on the thumbs, wwTrails.org opens the gallery page, and shows thumbs of all images and large images of the thumbs that were clicked on. When visitors upload images with Geotags (Information about the location where that picture was taken, stored in the image’s header) the website automatically shows a small map with the exact location of the image.

 

 

 

 

The last page is the after ride page. This page shows places for after rides/ hike gatherings. Those would be places uploaded by other trail lovers who visited and recommended them. That would be the best place to search for a good local bar for an after-ride beer.

Every page in wwTrails.org has its own unique link so visitors can very easily share and email pages to their friends or ride/hike partners.

Usefule links:

• Find a trail
• Trails List
• How to find a trail
• Uploading Trails
• Using mobile devices on trails

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