Walk it
Record while you flag the corridor. The phone keeps recording in your pocket with the screen off, and the line survives a dead battery or a closed app.
GPS recordingTrail planner
Lay out new trail, and show your working
Three ways to get a line — walk it, draw it, or ask for one — and then the same analysis on all three. Grade, side slope and cost, so the conversation with a landowner is about a number rather than a feeling.
Getting a line
Three ways in, one set of tools after
How the line arrives does not change what you can do with it — every line gets the same analysis, the same estimate and the same proposal.
Draw it
Tap the line onto the map on a desktop or in the field app, and drag points to adjust it. Elevation is filled in from open data as you go, so the profile updates while you work.
Or ask for one
Give the route finder two points and it proposes a line between them that holds a grade you set — following the contours rather than the shortest path.
What the finder is holding to
Rules a trail builder would recognize
The finder is not smoothing a line until it looks nice. It is searching ground against the constraints that decide whether trail survives a wet spring.
01
The half rule
A trail's grade should stay under half the grade of the hillside it crosses, or water runs down the tread instead of across it. The finder can hold this as a hard constraint, or relax it and flag every section where it had to.
02
Side slope, not just steepness
Ground too flat to shed water and ground too steep to bench are both bad, for opposite reasons. Both are scored.
03
Grade measured over a fixed window
The steepest pitch is measured over a sliding 25-meter baseline, so a short trail and a long one are compared on the same terms and a pitch cannot hide between two samples.
04
Built for the activity
What counts as sustainable differs for hiking, mountain bike and adaptive use. Pick the profile and the constraints move with it.
05
And you can overrule all of it
The analysis is advice. Draw the line you want, see where it breaks the rules, and decide — with the sections that need armoring marked rather than hidden.
What it costs to build
A price attached to the line it belongs to
A build estimate that lives beside the geometry updates when the geometry does — which is the difference between a quote and a spreadsheet that was true in March.
Priced per section
Machine-built, hand-built, rock work, structures — each stretch costed on what it actually takes to build, with a contingency you set.
Compare alternate lines
Try two alignments for the same stretch and compare them side by side. An alternative you are still weighing is never silently added into the total.
A proposal a landowner can open
A link to a page with the map, the elevation profiles, the photographs and the scope — no account, no PDF attachment, readable on a phone.
Costs shown only to the people who should see them
Whether a proposal carries the money is a choice per proposal, and inside your workspace it is a permission.
GPX in and out
Bring a line from another tool and take yours away again. A planned line becomes a real trail in one step when it is built.
All of it works offline
Record, draw, edit and read the analytics with no signal. The work queues on the phone and syncs when it can.
For builders working to a client
And when they say yes, the job carries on in the same place
A proposal is where a lot of tools stop. The project that was priced is the project that gets built, invoiced against and handed over — so nothing is re-keyed into a second system the day the work is won.
01
The job has a stage, and a client
Lead, quoted, won, building, complete, handed over — or lost, which is worth recording too. Every project belongs to a client so a season's work can be read by who it was for.
02
A won job gets a contract
Assembled from the project's own numbers rather than retyped, sent as a link the client opens in a browser, and signed by both sides there.
03
Sent means frozen
A contract cannot be edited once it has gone out — it is fixed and fingerprinted at that moment. A withdrawn one is voided and kept rather than deleted, because "we never sent that" is a claim somebody may make.
04
Costs land against the job as it is built
Crew hours, expenses and materials logged from the field roll up against the estimate, so you can see what a job is really costing while there is still time to do something about it.
05
Then hand it over
Give the finished trail — geometry, structures, photographs and history — to the client's own TrailsIQ organization, so they inherit something they can maintain rather than a folder of files.
In the documentation
How this works, in detail
Step-by-step guides for setting each of these up.
Walk your next reroute
Record a line on the free plan and read its grade before you flag a single corner.