The TrailsIQ map

The TrailsIQ map is a base map we build ourselves, for trail work specifically. It draws the roads, buildings, water and paths around your trails — and because it is ours rather than rented, it comes offline with a download and there is no monthly limit on how often your team opens a map.

It is what every new organization renders on. Organizations that predate it kept whatever they were already using, and can be moved across on request — the choice is per-organization and reversible at any time.

Why we draw it ourselves

Almost every base map you have used was drawn for somebody in a car. Roads carry the weight, junctions get the detail, and the paths — the lines your whole job is about — are a thin dotted afterthought under the tree cover. You can restyle a rented map's colors. You cannot make it care about a singletrack.

This one is drawn the other way round. Paths and tracks are the heaviest lines on it, in brown, so a trail reads as ground rather than as a footnote to a road.

Two more things follow from the map being ours rather than rented:

• It comes with you. Base-map tiles are part of an offline download on this engine — roads, paths, water and place names, on the device, in a valley. See It comes offline below.
• Nobody is counting. There is no monthly limit on how many times your team opens a map, so a busy week in the field cannot end with the map switching itself off.

Which map your organization is on

New organizations already have this one. Since August 2026 it is what every organization created from here renders on, so if yours is recent there is nothing to arrange.

Organizations that existed before that kept whatever they were already using. There are three possibilities, and the difference is only what the background under your trails is drawn from:

• TrailsIQ map — this one. Drawn for trail work, comes offline with a download, and never rationed.
• Mapbox — Mapbox's own maps. The one to stay on for satellite imagery outside the United States.
• A map provider — a third-party style, shared across the platform.

Switching is a support request rather than a setting on your side: contact us and we will move you, usually the same day. Nothing else about your organization changes with it. Trails, overlays, offline downloads, the field app and every marker behave exactly as before — only the background under them is different, so it is easy to try and easy to undo.

What a brand-new organization sees

Before it has any trails, it has no harvested tiles either — there is nothing of its own to harvest around yet. So the first map is the background color with hillshading over it, switched on for you automatically: you get the shape of the ground, ridges and valleys, without roads or place names.

Zoomed right out you will see a real map, because the widest tiles cover whole continents and are shared with every other organization.

Then the first trail is saved, the harvest runs, and the roads, water and place names around it appear within a minute or so. Maps also stop opening on a world view at that point and start opening on the organization's own ground.

Coverage follows your trails

This is the trade the map makes, and it is the one thing worth understanding before you switch across.

We do not hold a map of the world. We harvest the tiles around your trail lines — a corridor either side of them — and store those. Ground with no trail near it has no tiles, and draws on the plain background instead.

In practice the corridor is wider than it sounds. Tiles are large at the zoom levels involved, so the covered strip runs roughly 1.5–2 km either side of a trail. Nobody hits the background while looking at a trailhead, a car park, or the road in to it. Pan a long way off-network and you will.

The covered area changes as you zoom, and that is not a fault

This is the one thing about this map that looks like a bug and is not, so it is worth understanding before it surprises you.

Coverage is worked out at the closest zoom and then walked outwards. Each step out, one tile covers four times the ground of a tile at the step before — so the area with a map on it grows enormously as you zoom out, and narrows back toward your trails as you zoom in. For a small network it runs roughly:

Zoomed to	Ground with a map on it
Region	about 110 × 110 km
County	about 28 × 28 km
Valley	about 14 × 14 km
Trailhead	about 9 × 7 km

Two things follow, and they are the two things people ask about.

Zoomed out, you will see towns nowhere near your trails. That is one tile doing its job, not coverage you have paid for or can rely on. Zoom into one of those towns and it will not be there.

Zoomed in past the edge of your network, the map gives way to the background. It does not do so immediately: for the first few steps in, the wider view you already had is stretched over the gap, so the ground goes soft before it goes plain. Keep going and it goes plain. Both are correct — there is genuinely nothing harvested there, because nothing of yours is there.

Every map in TrailsIQ now zooms in further than it used to, and the last few steps are magnification rather than new detail — the same picture, larger, on covered ground as well as off it. That is deliberate. Zoom is not only how you see a thing, it is how you aim at one: a vertex on a line you are editing, the exact side of a switchback, one abutment on a bridge. Stopping at the last sharp level protected the picture at the cost of the aim. Softness at the deepest steps is the map telling you honestly that you have gone past what it knows.

If a place you do care about goes plain, that is a coverage question rather than a display one: it means no trail runs near enough for the harvest to have picked it up. Adding or extending a trail through it fixes it on the next save.

Harvesting happens automatically when a trail is created, or when an existing trail's geometry changes. It runs in the background and is usually quick.

Trails that already existed when your organization moved onto this map are harvested once as part of the move, so you do not need to re-save them. If a stretch of older trail still looks bare a day later, tell us and we will re-run it.

Two consequences worth knowing:

• A brand-new trail's surroundings appear shortly after it is saved, not instantly.
• Tiles are shared between organizations. They are public geography, not anybody's data. If two organizations look after trails in the same valley, the second one is covered the moment it arrives — the tiles are already there.

What it draws

An outdoor style, built for the job rather than borrowed:

• Paths and tracks drawn heavily, in brown, so they read as ground rather than tarmac. Most commercial outdoor styles under-draw exactly the lines a trail crew cares about; this one does not.
• Roads with a light casing so junctions stay legible.
• Buildings as soft footprints, from zoom 15 in.
• Water and waterways in blue.
• Woodland, parks and land cover in greens.
• Town and village names, from zoom 6 in.
• Road, water and place names, with route shields where a road carries a number.
• Railways as dashed lines.

Where we have no tiles, the background shows through — a muted cousin of whichever style you are on, so it reads as open country rather than as a hole in the map.

Three looks, same tiles

Styling a vector map happens on your device, so all three looks are drawn from the same tiles. Switching between them downloads nothing, stores nothing extra, and works offline — which is what makes a choice of style worth having here rather than being a settings screen nobody visits:

• TrailsIQ — vivid, outdoors. Saturated woodland and cream open ground, close to the Mapbox Outdoors look the product used before. The default, so an organization moved across sees something familiar.
• Outdoor — soft, outdoors. Sage ground and quieter greens, for reading a map over a long day.
• Minimal — light, outdoors. Near-monochrome, so your own trail colors carry the map. For reading condition and difficulty rather than for navigating.

Pick one from the Base map section of the layers panel. The choice is remembered on that device, and applies to the dashboard and the Field App alike. The terrain overlays are toned to match it — see Terrain analysis.

The Field App's map-layer sheet adds two rows for this map specifically, both off by default: Reserve boundaries (nature reserves and national parks) and Town / county lines. Neither is part of a trail crew's day, and both put lines across the whole map for a question nobody has asked yet — so they are there when you want them and absent when you do not.

Hide basemap trails, in the same sheet, is on by default: the paths this map draws come from OpenStreetMap, and where they disagree with your trail lines, yours are the authority. See Terrain analysis.

Terrain overlays still work

All of them, unchanged: hillshading, contours, slope and aspect. See Terrain analysis.

They are worth switching on here more than anywhere else. Hillshading and contours over the TrailsIQ map give you relief and height to go with the roads and buildings, and the combination reads as a proper topographic map rather than as a basemap with things missing.

Hillshading and contours are already switched on by default for organizations rendering on a plain background, and that behavior is unchanged.

What it does not have

Being straight about the limits, because they are the reason to keep Mapbox on some organizations:

• Satellite imagery is United States only. The aerial photography is flown by the US Department of Agriculture, and there is no equivalent we can offer elsewhere. An organization outside the US that needs aerial photography should stay on Mapbox — see Satellite below.
• Labels are Latin-alphabet only. The bundled font covers Latin-1. A place name outside that range draws no label rather than the wrong one.
• Only what has been harvested. Coverage follows the trails, and a network saved minutes ago may have no tiles yet. Everywhere else this is the one limit worth planning around; see Coverage follows your trails above.

It comes offline

Base-map tiles are part of an offline download on this engine, and only on this engine — a rented map's license does not allow its tiles to be packaged up and carried away, and ours does. Roads, paths, water and place names come with the trip.

They are stored once per device rather than once per download, for the same reason they are stored once per area on our side: a vector tile is public geography, identical for everyone who asks for it. Two downloads over neighboring ground share the shallow zooms, so the second one costs very little, and removing either never takes a tile the other still needs.

Only tiles already harvested are included. A download cannot fetch what we have not collected, so the sheet prices what is genuinely on disk and says Nothing harvested for this area yet rather than quoting ground that would arrive empty.

The styles come too. All three are downloaded with the tiles, not just the one you happened to be using, so the Base map picker works in the field exactly as it does with a signal. They share the tiles — that is the whole reason there are three — so this costs three small files, not three maps.

With no signal the picker offers only the styles actually on the device. If a download predates this and carried the tiles but not the styles, you will see fewer buttons than usual until the next download — which is the deliberate answer rather than a button that blanks the map when you press it.

See Offline downloads.

Switching back

Ask us to move you back. It takes effect on the next page load and nothing is lost — the tiles harvested for your trails stay where they are, so switching across again later is instant.

Nothing about the organization's data depends on the engine. The choice is only about what is drawn underneath.

Attribution

The map data comes from OpenStreetMap, used under the Open Database License, which requires credit. "© OpenStreetMap contributors" appears in the map's attribution control, in the bottom corner.

That credit is a license condition, not decoration. Do not remove it.

Satellite

A fourth base map that swaps the drawn ground for aerial photographs, with your trails, the roads and the place names still drawn on top of them. It is the one style that is not just a different set of colors over the same tiles, and it is on Core and up.

The photography is the US Department of Agriculture's National Agriculture Imagery Program — about two feet per pixel, flown state by state every two or three years. So it is genuinely current for the shape of the ground and the tree line, and it will not show a cut you made last month.

It covers the United States and nothing else. There is no equivalent we can offer for other countries, so organizations outside the US do not see the option at all rather than seeing one that would paint a blank rectangle over their valley. If your organization is in the US and Satellite is missing, check that your country is set under Settings → Organization details — that field is what decides it.

Two things behave differently while Satellite is showing:

• Hillshading switches itself off, and its row leaves the layers sheet. A photograph already carries the terrain's own light and shadow; gray shading on top of it reads as a dirty screen rather than as relief. Your choice comes back when you leave Satellite.
• 3-D terrain does not. Extruded photography is the one combination that gets better, so that row stays.

Coverage still has edges. Zoom past what the imagery holds and it softens rather than disappearing — that is a photograph being enlarged, which is what it looks like everywhere else too.