I was very lucky to grow up in Edmonton which has the North Saskatchewan river valley. Growing up near Mill Creek Ravine, I had a whole lot of nature to explore.
I usually run Strava to record my rides but this time I went with a friend and it was supposed to be an easy ride. 14 kms later, according to my phone and 1.75 hours the ride was done.
The post was supposed to be be about how I love returning to the trails of my youth but my lack of a GPS route was bugging me. Strava, Mapmyride, Trailforks, I do have all of them on my phone but I didn’t turn it on because I forgot and thought “I can map the route later”.
Stava snaps to the official trails, even in Manual mode with the Heatmap as a basemap. So onto Mapmyride, nope, not going to work either. The trails aren’t there and the basemap doesn’t have no leaf cover for the trees, so you can’t see the trail lines in aerial photography.
Onto Trailforks, the path line work is there but because the topology doesn’t connect the routing doesn’t work. Topology is ensuring a network of lines and node are intersecting and there aren’t any gaps. We can compensate for gaps when drawing lines, but route tracing follows the network lines and can’t make the jump to near by areas. Trailforks has routes from other users available, you can download the route and if you have the know-how you can trim and connect the trails together.
The route from yesterday will probably remain unrecorded, because it’s a pain to trace 14kms of trails.
singletrackmap 