Before Trailforks, We Had Bad Directions and Confidence

Mountain biking is easier now.

Not the actual riding. Rocks remain rocks. Climbs remain offensively uphill. Gravity still operates with the same enthusiasm it always has, particularly after you have chosen the wrong line.

But nearly everything surrounding the ride has become easier.

You can find a trail from your couch, inspect every intersection, read recent condition reports, see how many people rode it yesterday, download the route to your phone, send it to your watch, and follow a brightly colored line through the woods. Before leaving the house, you can know the mileage, elevation gain, average grade, technical difficulty, likely ride time, parking situation, and whether somebody named ShredDad76 thought the trail was "a little loose" three summers ago.

This is mostly wonderful.

It is also very different from how many of us learned to ride.

A Conversation in Richfield

This article really started in a hotel room in Richfield, Utah, during Single Speed USA 2026.

Fixie Dave and I had spent the day riding one gear through the dry Utah heat and had returned to a room containing two bikes, damp riding clothes, several empty drink containers, and the sort of odor that eventually defeats hotel air conditioning.

At some point, we started talking about how much easier it is to find and follow a mountain-bike route now.

We talked about buying trail maps and guidebooks, spreading them across a table, and trying to understand where the ride actually went. We talked about studying contour lines, tracing possible loops with a finger, and hoping that the vague black line marked on the map still existed when we arrived.

A mountain-bike trip often began with a visit to the local bike shop. You bought the local trail map, asked the person behind the counter where to ride, and listened carefully while they described a route using landmarks, trail names, and assumptions about local geography that you did not possess.

Then you left the shop and tried to figure it out.

Many mountain-bike shorts even had a pocket positioned specifically for carrying a folded map. This was considered a feature. The map would spend the ride pressed against your thigh, slowly absorbing sweat until the creases weakened and the ink began transferring itself onto your leg.

Dave had a more serious version of this experience. He rode the Tour Divide before modern phone navigation and reliable handlebar GPS mapping became normal. He followed the Adventure Cycling Association maps down the length of the route, carrying a stack of paper through thousands of miles of remote country.

I find that astonishing.

Not because the maps were inadequate. The Adventure Cycling maps were carefully made and contained the information riders needed. But there was no glowing blue dot continuously confirming that Dave remained exactly where he intended to be.

You had the map, the road, the landscape, and your own ability to connect them.

That was navigation.

The Old System

There was a time when finding a trail involved considerably more faith.

You might have had a paper map. Not a waterproof map, necessarily. Just a folded piece of paper that spent the day absorbing sweat until the contour lines became more conceptual than geographic.

You might have received directions from somebody at a bike shop.

"Climb for a while, take the left after the cattle guard, stay right when the trail looks like it goes left, then look for the old fence post."

Which cattle guard?

What fence post?

How long is "a while"?

These were not unreasonable questions, but the person giving the directions had already turned away to help somebody buy a tube.

Sometimes the route came from a photocopy of a photocopy. Sometimes it was drawn in pen on the back of a receipt. Occasionally somebody would describe a trail entirely by landmarks that no longer existed.

"Turn where the burned tree used to be."

Perfect.

Trail guidebooks were often the best available option. You read the description several times, studied the small printed map, memorized the important turns, and carried the book or a copied page in your pack.

A typical guide might tell you to ride 2.7 miles, turn at an unsigned junction, pass through a gate, and look for singletrack on the right shortly after crossing a drainage.

If your bike computer said 2.7 miles and there was no junction, you began the familiar process of wondering whether the author measured distance differently, whether your computer was wrong, or whether the trail had been rerouted sometime during the previous decade.

The answer was usually all three.

Early GPS Was Not the Future We Imagined

Eventually, GPS computers arrived and promised to solve everything.

They did not solve everything.

Early Garmin units were impressive pieces of technology, but they also had opinions. A route could contain too many points. A track could be too long. The file might need to be simplified until a carefully recorded ribbon of singletrack became a vague geometric suggestion.

You would spend an evening loading a route, converting it into the correct format, reducing the point count, disconnecting the device, reconnecting it, and discovering that the track had either vanished or been renamed something like TRACK_004_FINAL2.

Then you would arrive at the trail and realize the screen was roughly the size of a postage stamp.

The route line existed. So did several roads, two creeks, and an arrow that may or may not have represented you.

Zooming out showed where you were going but removed the trail detail. Zooming in showed every bend but provided no indication whether the next junction was ten feet away or in another county.

We were not navigating with advanced technology. We were arguing with a small gray appliance while standing in the woods.

Those early units also consumed AA batteries with remarkable enthusiasm. You could install a fresh pair in the morning and still carry backups because the GPS might decide halfway through the ride that twelve hours of battery life was more of an optimistic suggestion.

Rechargeable batteries helped, assuming you remembered to charge them. Lithium batteries lasted longer, assuming you could justify using expensive camera batteries to prevent yourself from becoming geographically confused.

The GPS lived on the handlebar. Spare batteries lived in the pack. The paper map came along anyway.

Phones were not much help. Early smartphones were barely sophisticated enough to load a webpage reliably, much less display a detailed offline trail system while bouncing down a mountain. Mobile coverage disappeared quickly outside town, battery life was limited, and mapping applications were designed primarily to help you find a restaurant, not determine which unsigned cattle trail eventually returned to the parking lot.

You were generally left with two options: a barely usable GPS or a paper map.

Most people chose the map.

Getting Lost Was Part of It

We got lost.

Not always dramatically lost. Usually just a little lost.

Lost enough to ride fifteen minutes in the wrong direction. Lost enough to stop at an intersection and confidently select the worst possible option. Lost enough to insist that the trail would "probably reconnect" because turning around would require admitting that nobody knew where we were.

There is a particular form of group decision-making that occurs when several mountain bikers are lost together. Nobody has useful information, but everyone develops a strong opinion.

One person remembers a ridge. Another remembers crossing water. Someone insists the parking lot is west despite having no idea which direction west is.

The rider who has remained silent eventually says, "I think we should have turned back there," referring to a junction from forty minutes earlier.

That rider is always correct.

We were not tougher than riders are now. We were not rugged navigational geniuses. We were simply less informed and too embarrassed to admit how long it had been since the last recognizable landmark.

Sometimes this led to adventure. Sometimes it led to extra miles. Sometimes it led to an angry spouse wondering why a two-hour ride had become a six-hour disappearance.

Only one of those makes a good story.

Memory has also been kind to these experiences. We remember the surprise viewpoint, the strange abandoned road, and the unexpected descent that somehow returned us to town.

We tend to forget the hour spent climbing in the wrong direction, the empty water bottles, and the growing concern that the vehicle might be on the opposite side of the mountain.

Many old rides became adventures only after enough time had passed to edit out the miserable parts.

Trailforks Changed Everything

Now we have Trailforks.

And Ride with GPS.

And Strava routes.

And Garmin navigation that generally works.

And watches that vibrate before the turn instead of waiting until twenty minutes after it.

You can stand at a junction, pull out your phone, and watch a blue dot reveal exactly which trail you are on. The route may be remote, the signage may be nonexistent, and you may have ignored three previous turns, but the phone knows.

This is an astonishing improvement.

Trailforks in particular has made unfamiliar riding dramatically more approachable. It shows legal access, trail direction, difficulty, closures, connections, and often recent reports from local riders. It can help keep people off private property, out of sensitive areas, and away from routes that are closed or damaged.

You can arrive in a town you have never visited, open an app, identify a popular loop, download it for offline use, and begin riding within the hour.

That would have felt like science fiction when we were standing in a bike shop trying to remember whether the employee said to turn before or after the second cattle guard.

It is difficult to argue against any of this.

Which is unfortunate, because arguing against useful technology is the foundation of most good aging-cyclist rants.

We Have Become Very Comfortable

The interesting part is not that navigation became easier.

The interesting part is how quickly we decided that easy navigation was the minimum acceptable standard.

A trail system without complete digital coverage now feels unfinished. A route without a downloadable GPX feels suspicious. An unmarked intersection can provoke the kind of concern once reserved for broken frames and approaching thunderstorms.

Some riders check the map at every junction, including junctions where there is only one plausible direction.

The blue dot must remain on the line. The line must remain visible. The phone must have enough battery to continue confirming that the trail beneath the tires is, in fact, the trail beneath the tires.

We have not merely gained useful tools. We have become accustomed to complete informational comfort.

Every route should be known in advance. Every climb should have a number. Every descent should have a rating. Every intersection should have an answer.

The unknown has become a software bug.

This changes the way we experience unfamiliar places. We can complete the route without ever developing much understanding of where we are. We follow the line, make the turns, finish the loop, and return to the vehicle with a complete GPS recording but only a vague mental picture of the landscape.

We know the route without necessarily knowing the place.

This Is Not a Complaint About Safety

There is an important distinction between being slightly unsure and being dangerously lost.

Getting turned around near town can become a funny story. Getting lost in the desert without enough water is not character-building. It is an emergency with poor planning attached.

Modern navigation makes riding safer. It helps riders understand distance, terrain, water availability, and escape options. It makes unfamiliar trail systems accessible to people who do not have a local guide or several weekends to learn through failure.

It also helps riders stay on legal trails. That matters. Accidentally entering private property, wilderness, closed habitat, or a one-way downhill trail in the wrong direction is not an expression of rugged independence.

It is just being wrong with confidence.

Nobody needs to abandon GPS and ride into the wilderness carrying only a hand-drawn map and masculine insecurity.

That is not the point.

The point is that navigation used to require more observation. You had to remember the previous intersection. You had to notice the shape of the ridge. You had to understand roughly where the road, river, or trailhead sat in relation to you.

You watched the landscape because the landscape was part of the navigation system.

Now it is possible to travel through an entire trail network while paying attention mainly to a small illuminated arrow.

That is safer and easier.

It may also leave us knowing less about where we have been.

The Hypocrisy Is Not Lost on Me

I recently spent an entire evening adding GPX-based route maps to this website.

The system calculates distance and elevation, displays an elevation profile, generates a static map preview, offers an interactive map, and lets readers download the original GPX.

The goal is straightforward: help people understand the ride and avoid getting lost.

Immediately afterward, I began thinking about writing an article complaining that nobody gets lost anymore.

This is not hypocrisy so much as a mature ability to hold two opposing opinions when both are convenient.

I like modern navigation. I use modern navigation. I built more modern navigation into my own website.

I also think something changes when every ride is fully explained before it begins.

The map removes uncertainty, but uncertainty was occasionally part of the fun.

That does not mean I intend to remove the maps. Quite the opposite. The route pages exist because sending someone into an unfamiliar trail system with a paragraph of vague instructions would be irresponsible, especially when I already possess the GPX.

I am not asking readers to recreate 1998 for authenticity.

I am simply acknowledging that convenience always changes the experience it improves.

A Little Room for Discovery

There is value in knowing where you are going.

There is also value in looking up.

A route line should be a tool, not a leash. You can glance at the map, put the phone away, and ride long enough to understand the terrain around you. You can notice where the trail bends, where the drainage runs, and which ridge leads back toward the car.

You can take the unplanned spur when time, access, and conditions allow.

You can miss a turn, realize it, and correct it without treating the incident as a systems failure.

You can even ask another rider for directions, though this introduces the risk of conversation.

None of this requires pretending the old way was better.

Paper maps got wet. Directions were bad. GPS units ran out of memory and ate batteries. Phones were useless. People got lost. Rides ran long. Nobody at home knew where you were because location sharing had not yet transformed every outing into a lightly supervised expedition.

Modern tools are better. They are safer, easier, and more reliable.

We should use them.

We just do not have to let them remove every ounce of uncertainty from the experience.

Easier Is Good

Mountain biking does not need to be inconvenient to be authentic.

You do not earn additional credibility by carrying a torn map, running out of water, or returning to the trailhead after dark. Difficulty is readily available on the trail itself. There is no need to manufacture more of it through poor navigation.

But it is worth remembering how much easier things have become.

We can discover new places in minutes. We can follow routes created by riders we have never met. We can arrive in an unfamiliar town and ride a good loop that afternoon. We can share a GPX with someone across the country and give them a reasonable chance of returning to their vehicle.

That is incredible.

We are spoiled.

And that is fine.

Just remember to look beyond the blue dot occasionally.

The trail is still out there.

• culture
• navigation
• single-speed