Inspecting trails

Open a trail in the Field App and tap Inspect this trail. Five questions, one per screen, all of them tap-only — nothing to type, with a glove on, in the rain. Add a photo on any question and it stays attached to that question rather than landing in a pile at the end.

It is the same wizard as Inspecting structures, asking about a trail instead of a bridge. One of the questions does something the others do not, and it is worth reading the last section for.

The five questions

• Is the trail usable right now? — asked first, because it is the only answer that changes what somebody does in the next ten minutes. An inspector who is interrupted half way through has still given you the one that matters.
• How wet is the tread? — dry and dusty, firm and dry, damp but firm, soft or greasy, or puddles and running water.
• Tread — holding up, normal wear, rutting or braiding, washed out.
• Anything in the way? — clear, blowdown you can get past, blocked.
• Drains and water bars — running clear, silting up, blocked or ponding, or none on this trail.

Every answer carries a grade of its own — Good, Marginal or Poor — and the record takes the worst one. A trail with four good answers and a washout is not "mostly fine"; it is a trail with a washout. The record says which answer set the call, so a manager reading a queue knows what to bring before they leave.

Tread and Anything in the way? also offer Doesn't apply, for a section the question is not about. It grades nothing — passing a question over cannot move the walk's rating either way, and it is never named as the answer that drove it — but it stays in the record, which is the point: "we looked, and there is nothing of that kind here" is worth as much as a grade.

The first two questions never offer it. Every trail is either usable or it is not, and every trail has a surface — and the wetness answer is what reaches the trail-status engine, so a walk that passed over it would tell the engine nothing. Drains and water bars does not offer it either, because it already answers the same thing with None on this trail, which grades and so says more.

What happens when you save

A record is kept. Who walked it, when, every answer, and the photographs. It is never edited — a record you can go back and change is not evidence of anything. Correct a mistake by inspecting again, which is also what happened on the ground.

Work is offered, not filed behind your back. If the answers add up to Marginal or Poor, the app offers to Create a maintenance task with the failing answers already written into it. You are standing at the problem, which is the cheapest moment it will ever be reported.

The trail's own status is not changed unless you ask for it. That is deliberate, and it is the next section — and it is why an inspection is graded Good, Marginal or Poor rather than open, caution or closed. A walk is a reading of what the ground is like, not a decision to close a trail; the words say which of the two you are doing.

When you do want both, the review step offers a second box: Set the trail's status, with Caution and Closed beside it. It starts unticked, unlike the maintenance one — filing a task adds work to a queue somebody triages, and changing a trail's status is a public statement that changes what riders and hikers do today. Tick it and the trail changes the moment the inspection lands, so it works from a spot with no signal like everything else here.

Two things about it worth knowing before you rely on it. It is offered to the people who can already change trail statuses — the same permission as the Trail Conditions screen, so volunteers record the walk and do not set the status. And an inspection can set Caution or Closed but never reopen a trail: walking one stretch and finding it fine is not evidence that whatever closed it has been dealt with. Reopening stays a decision somebody makes on the Trail Conditions screen with the whole picture in front of them.

If your workspace has weather automation set to open and close trails, the box says so: the next weather check writes whatever the forecast says, so a status you set by hand can be replaced within the hour. Switch the setting to close-only if you want your call to stand.

The wetness answer goes to the trail-status engine

This is the part worth knowing.

If you use weather automation, TrailsIQ keeps a running estimate of how much water your ground is holding — built from months of daily rainfall, snowmelt and drying. See How to enable weather automation.

An inspection measures the thing that estimate is guessing at. So when somebody reports how wet the tread is, the engine stops estimating on that day and carries on from what was seen — applying the real rain, snowmelt and drying since. The forecast is not thrown away; it is started from a better place.

The effect is the one you would want. A network the weather says to close, with one trail somebody walked yesterday and found firm and dry, will recommend closing the others and leaving that one open. The recommendation says so in as many words: "Conditions good. Trail wetness 12% from Dana's walk on Aug 30 …"

Only the wetness answer does this. Skip that question and the inspection is still a full record; it simply tells the engine nothing, which is right — an inspection that skipped it is not a report of average ground.

How long your walk outranks the forecast

A reading does not last forever, it fades rather than stopping, and it does not last the same length of time in both directions.

The day you walk it, the trail's conditions are your reading. Each day after, a little more of the forecast comes back, until your walk is no longer moving the number and stops being counted:

• A reading wetter than the forecast fades out over about ten days.
• A reading drier than the forecast fades out over about four.

It fades rather than expiring on a particular morning so that conditions never change on you with no weather behind it — a walk that counted in full yesterday and not at all today would look like the app changing its mind.

The difference between ten and four is deliberate. Somebody reporting soft or greasy ground has stood in it — the claim is specific and nobody files it by accident. Somebody reporting firm and dry is describing the whole trail from wherever they happened to be, which is often the drained ridge and rarely the low wet corner that decides the call. Being wrong in the wet direction costs a ride. Being wrong in the dry direction costs tread that takes a season to grow back.

Two things follow that are easy to misread:

• Rain since your walk still counts. A dry reading does not hold a trail open through a storm — the storm is applied on top of what you saw, and the trail closes.
• "Wetter" and "drier" are measured against what the forecast would have said today, not against how wet the ground felt to you. A dusty reading in August usually agrees with the forecast rather than correcting it, and an agreeing reading is not holding anything up.

Walk it again and it counts in full from that day.

Reading the history

In the Field App, open Trails, tap the trail, and its Inspection history sits under the panel: every walk newest first, the rating each came back with, and — because the question standing on the trail is is it worse than last time — what MOVED since the walk before it, worse in red and better in green. Tap a row to open the answers as they were worded that day, with the photographs taken on each one. It reads with no signal from what your phone already holds, and says so when the copy on screen is the stored one. A walk still waiting to upload appears in the list too, marked, so filing one at the far end of a trail and finding the history unchanged does not read as a filing that did not take.

A recorded walk's photos can still be fixed from there. Expand the walk and each photo carries Remove photo, with + Add photo at the end. Nothing quietly replaces a stored picture — a photo is added or a photo is taken off, so the record shows what happened rather than reading as though it had always looked that way. That part needs a connection.

On the trail's own page, an Inspections panel lists the most recent walks, newest first — the rating each came back with, who did it, what the tread was like, and the answer that set the rating. Where an inspection created a maintenance task, the row links straight to it.

Trails → Inspections is the same record across every trail at once, and it is the screen to open when the question spans more than one: what the crew walked last month, what came back Marginal or Poor, who has been doing them, and where somebody found standing water. Narrow it by date range, by trail, by rating or by who walked it. Needs attention collects everything that came back Marginal or Poor, without your having to pick both.

Answers read as they were worded at the time. Re-word a question next season and every past record still reads correctly.

Photos sit with the question they were taken on, so the picture of the washout is under Tread rather than in a gallery where somebody has to guess.

Share in the header holds both exports, and each hands you what you are looking at, filtered exactly as it is on screen. PDF report is one row per walk on your organization's letterhead — the document to send to a land manager who has asked what you have on record. CSV spreadsheet writes one row per answer instead, so individual answers stay sortable.

Asking your own questions

Settings → Trail inspection questions is where the middle of the form lives. Add a question, word it how your crew talks, give it between two and six answers, and put each answer against Open, Caution or Closed — the worst answer given is the one that sets the inspection's status. Move questions up and down to change the order they are asked in, and Use the standard questions puts our set back.

Two questions are always asked and are not in the editor, and the page shows them so you can see the whole form. Is the trail usable right now? leads, because it is the only answer that changes what somebody does in the next ten minutes — an inspector who gets interrupted has still given it. How wet is the tread? is a measurement rather than an opinion: it is the answer the trail-status engine reads to work out whether recent weather has left your ground rideable, so its wording and its bands are ours rather than yours.

Editing the questions never changes what has already been recorded. Every inspection keeps the questions as they were worded on the day it was done, so a question you re-word this season still reads correctly against last season's walks, and a question you remove stays on the records that answered it. It just stops being asked.

Changes reach the Field App the next time it launches with a connection.

Common gotchas

• The trail's status is yours to set. An inspection recommends and records; it never flips the trail open or closed on its own. Where weather automation is on, the engine owns that column, and two things writing to it would leave you unable to tell which of them last spoke.
• A trail nobody has walked is scored on the forecast alone, exactly as before. Nothing changes for a workspace that never inspects.
• Filing late is fine. Walk it with no signal and the inspection queues; it records the day you were on the trail, not the day it reached us. The engine anchors on the day of the walk.
• A back-dated record does not drag anything backwards. Catching up a paper log will not overwrite a more recent walk's date.