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Consolidated Mountain Bike Trail Listing for Southern Nevada?

7K views 39 replies 20 participants last post by  Camaleon 
#1 ·
After reading the Twlight thread in this group, its obvious to me there is some confusion on where trails are located, that an integrated trail guide might be a nice thing. Ugh. I'm sort of a new guy here, but I sure can't find decent trail maps of the greater Las Vegas area. I'd sure like to fix that. From another thread:
knoob said:
Our trails are not marked worth a sh!t! But there is some help coming on that front. Hopefully 1st part of the new year.
I would like to VOLUNTEER (that means free!) to put an integrated map / lookup system together for the area. I've made a few calls and email submissions to the local organizations with this offer, none of them have bothered to respond. Not sure why that is so hard. What I'm looking for is a not-for-profit web site that is willing to display mountain bike trail maps.

I've spent time in Strava, endomondo, garmin connect, seen the two large paper maps of the area, done plenty of google searches, etc... Its clear to me that there is no way to overview what's available in the area. I'm a computer geek, with lots of web experience (CSS, DB, Javascript, java, php, Ajax libraries, etc..) I've been playing around with the Google map API's lately. The web site that sticks in my head for a decent format are the individual trails linked from the Sun Valley Idaho trail map... BCRD Summer TraiLink - Home

I'm thinking:

--Map oriented overview of trails in the area.
--directions to trailhead, including parking instructions.
--couple of comments about the trail.
--Map which can EASILY be printed on 8.5x11" paper so you can slip it into your pocket for your ride.
--GPS route for easy download from the web site (.gpx format?)
--Three times around your block does not really qualify as a mountain bike trail. (Yup, you did it on your mountain bike, and yup, you threw it onto garmin connect, but ...that doesn't really work.)

The goal is that a visitor (or even long time local resident) can go to a search engine, type in "Las Vegas area mountain bike trail maps" and find an integrated system to help them choose a ride, drive a car to the trail head and negotiate the trail safely.

Again, what I'm looking for is a not-for-profit web site that is willing to display mountain bike trail maps.

The meetup organization is one place, but an integrated map tab won't really fit into their current web schema (I strongly recommend that they save money, do their own thing. ref: Mountain Bike Las Vegas (Las Vegas, NV) - Meetup )

The Southern Nevada Mountain Bike Assoc ( SNMBA | Southern Nevada Mountain Bike Association | SNMBA ) would be a great place to post, but they apparently aren't interested. They don't answer their phone or email and don't check their messages, sigh. Their web site shows the next meeting is 12 Sept 2012. I'm thinking they are not on top of their game.

Your comments? Does anybody have names, email address, phone #'s for direct contacts of local groups? (The web site "contact us now" stuff is apparently ignored...)

If you need to respond to me personally, please use the private message system. Many thanks, zip.
 
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#4 · (Edited)
zipzit

You have a wonderful idea for the southern Nevada area. I wish you the most success. I am always perusing the web looking for new places to ride. Now especially that its winter time and the warmer climates of Arizona, Nevada, SoCal are looking good. It is always difficult to find information on trails that are not well known. The best site I have found is utahmountainbiking.com for trails in Utah. What a quality site. I would think that state, area or local tourism bureau's would jump at the chance to promote mountain biking in their areas. Moab, UT is really figuring this out with new trails and great maps, and trail organization. Spent two weeks down there lately stimulating their local economy. Bend, Oregon (Central Oregon Trails Association) is another area that has figured this out. We spent over a week in that area recently stimulating their economy with our travels and riding. Quality trail system too. This fellow is on the road locally with his web site. Idaholosttrails.blogspot.com

Sun Valley, Idaho area is also promoting marketing and new trails to increase turism in the summer time. A quality website is valuable for any area.

I often download gpx tracks for areas on everytrail.com or maps from singletracks.com. These sites are a great start but the easier you make it for the user to get comprehensive trail information for a local area or statewide area the more people are apt to ride those areas.

Again, best wishes and a hope for great success in your endeavour.
 
#6 ·
I'm here to help. I work with graphics all day so if you need any help let me know. Originally I thought the same thing, that the trail names and locations are a little disjointed out there. But now that I've made an active effort to just go explore and find new stuff via google earth its all coming together.

The Skid Map

The Skid map is what I use almost exclusively for Utah. Might be possible to do something like that or even piggyback on their website? That plus easily downloadable pamphlets similar to what Utah Mountain Biking does would be perfect;
Utah Classic Rides!

I don't think signs are necessary or even a possibility. But the ability to kind of see what other trails are out there and to go explore would be nice. I'm very familiar with Cottonwood (ride there a couple times a week) and even I found and rode a new to me trail/spur this week.

Take for example Twilight. You can see from various posts and google earth that there are a ton of trails out there and even the chance of connecting some of the charleston trails (tin can alley) with Twilight. But having never ridden there its hard to know which is the preferred direction of travel, best loops, biggest mileage, etc..I typically find myself exploring Strava and then copying somebody elses loop.

Names are the next big issue. Take a look at Strava and Cottonwood. Lots of little sections with names that I've never heard of. Late night seems to be any trail coming out of the paved lot. A new map with names, mileage, and typical intersections would be really nice. Something along the lines of the new Bootleg map (which even it is missing some of the best trails, Ernies, Railroad pass, etc).

Good luck.
 
#7 ·
"The Southern Nevada Mountain Bike Assoc ( SNMBA | Southern Nevada Mountain Bike Association | SNMBA ) would be a great place to post, but they apparently aren't interested. They don't answer their phone or email and don't check their messages, sigh. Their web site shows the next meeting is 12 Sept 2012. I'm thinking they are not on top of their game."

ZipZit... Your description is not entirely correct. SNMBA is actually working hard right now on some interesting projects. Are you a member? SNMBA would be happy to work with you on such a project. Contact me privately if you'd like.
 
#8 ·
A couple of updates.
--Although the Southern Nevada Mountain Bike Association web site htttttp://snmba.org is a little out of date, it turns out that the folks there are very active and up to date on their Facebook site. htttps://www.facebook.com/SNMBA?fref=ts

--I was able to link up with Ron R. of the Mountain Bike Las Vegas Meetup group this afternoon, and I think we have a winner. Ron will have to get confirmations with some of the key folks there before we can proceed, but it looks like we will attempt to upgrade the web site at htttp://mountainbikelasvegas.com/ <<--- Great URL name.

Many thanks. Stay tuned for more updates!

--zip
 
#37 ·
--I was able to link up with Ron R. of the Mountain Bike Las Vegas Meetup group this afternoon, and I think we have a winner. Ron will have to get confirmations with some of the key folks there before we can proceed, but it looks like we will attempt to upgrade the web site at htttp://mountainbikelasvegas.com/ <<--- Great URL name.

Many thanks. Stay tuned for more updates!

--zip
Seems like you are on the right path!

Good luck with the trail names :thumbsup:

Matt
Yeah no kidding right? every trail out there have one or 2 or many names depending on who you talk to and some times the same person have 2 names for the same trail depending on what direction is being ridden. The heck some freaking trails have names on another languages "La Española" que mamadas son esas si estamos en Los United States, Cabrones!

I personally haven't had much luck with skidmap as you can only download so many trail and uploads didn't work that good.
Now with Mountain bike Maps the problems I have is that the information is not accurate at least to "ME" and they are missing trails.

I hope this is taken as constructive criticisms as that's how I intend it to be.

So I guess "MY" overall conclusion is they are not 100% user friendly and they don't work as I will like them to.
Are they great help for out of towners? Well to a certain extent.

I am a local and ride everywhere and the last time I used them as a resource to get some .gpx files and overlap them to create a route and then upload it to my phone to follow on the ground it didn't work I couldn't do it and I spend over 30 minutes trying.
FYI I was also using my own .gpx files in my attempt.
At that point I really rather just ride my bike and figure it all out on the ground exploring.
Maybe I just don't know what I am doing but that brings it all back to point 1 on any WEB SITE "User Friendly" Dumb proof.
If it's to complicated and confusing for the average Joe it doesn't work.

Best of luck and I think you collaborating and joining forces with the Biggest and Best MTB group in the State can only lead to great things.
 
#10 ·
That's a great idea zipzit. Thanks for your volunteered time and talents. As an out-of-towner who knows some trails in Vegas but not all, this would be a great resource.

When you're finished with that, how about helping us up in ely putting something together. We have the non-profit website available and a desire to share the knowledge with visitors..... just not a lot of know-how or time to get it figured out.

Great Basin Trails Alliance
 
#11 ·
When you're finished with that, how about helping us up in ely putting something together. We have the non-profit website available and a desire to share the knowledge with visitors..... just not a lot of know-how or time to get it figured out.

Great Basin Trails Alliance
Krob,
PM sent with my phone number. Great idea.. I will say, I'd much rather train somebody to do this than be responsible for your site in the long term future. Been there, done that and it ALWAYS ends badly. Got anybody interested in learning web site stuff? Even a kid 14 or up? I am happy to train folks, as long as they want to learn... and for this stuff, gratis, free, no charge. We'd work via phone or skype or facetime.

--Zip
 
#12 ·
I've started work on this thing, in prototype. Wow, its going to take awhile.

Areas I'm focusing on right now:

Mt. Charleston
Kyle Canyon Road
Bears Best
Red Rock Canyon
Cowboy Trails
North & South Cottonwood Valley
Black Mountain / Bootleg Canyon
Valley of Fire
Coyote Springs

Am I missing anything?

I'm all about being a responsible mountain biker. Park you car in the right place, respect the rights of private property owners, yield to Hikers, equestrians, take your trash out with you, etc....I'm aware of the rules in the Red rock area. I'm not so clear on access to Coyote Springs (isn't that private property?). Are there other areas that we need to tread carefully?

A couple of things. I really would like to make gps routes readily available. If anybody has routes they'd like to suggest would you drop me a pm? I've been finding stuff that is openly available, but I suspect there may be more out there. I would like to gain the approval and acknowledge the source of the upload where ever possible. I'm using the MTBR.com Private Message (PM) system to accomplish some of this.

Another potential problem. I'm aware of two high quality maps of the area. One map is "Leaving Fabulous Las Vegas Trail Map Biking & Hiking" glossy color thing. Very nice map, zero info on who published it. I would like to paraphrase bits and pieces of the map, not sure who the credit goes to, or even if there are legalities with doing so. (If you printed a map for major big bucks profit, and someone took some of the info from there to put on a free web site would you be pissed? ) My suspicion is the map was published as a service to aid the mountain biking community, and a public web page is consistent with that goal, but who am I to offer business advice... Anybody know who developed that map? Ditto for a full color "Bootleg Canyon Trails, Boulder City Nevada" map. No info on who published the thing. Anybody know how I can contact the folks who own that? (edit: oops.. I see a web link to bootlegcanyon.net | Mountain Bike Downhill & Cross Country Trail System... I can link up there..)

Many thanks, zip.
 
#14 ·
Wow. That is a really cool resource unkosama. Looks like zipszit would be duplicating a lot of work with his project. Can't believe I'd never discovered skidmap.com before.

Thank you. I'll be using that in the future for sure.

What other areas besides those listed on the website are you considering for inclusion in the future?
 
#15 · (Edited)
oops.. bad posting. I screwed up and included an HTML coding in my wording... It killed the entire end of the page for me. Lets try this again. In reply to the skidmap folks:

Unkosama... the skidmap thing is awesome work, and I agree it doesn't make sense for all of us to do the same work twice.

I will say, you've got a lot going on, with lots of data, and lots of awesome tools. But, that comes at a cost... I'm having a terrible time with the page, VERY slow to load. As it loads up with more and more users, what happens then?

Is it possible for us to update YOUR database for routes in our local area, in exchange we will use extracts from your site via (fancy html tags not to be repeated here)? I'm sure you are aware of this type of thing being done currently by the folks at gpsvisualizer_com GPS Visualizer: FAQ (hint, hint!) (extract of a gpsvisualizer map included below..)

Its not really clear where you are going on your revenue stream.. are you intending to offer up GENTLE on map advertising? Or perhaps hoping to bill folks for downloads? Or even better, I have an idea for you:

I'd propose a skidmap template system. The skidplate template consists of a web page with local areas highlighted, sort of as an overview. After a user clicks on a specific trail area, that would popup a trail page with map, print button, sample gpx downloads. Click on the map for update (and jump over to skidmap.com) for such awesome tools as route selection, elevation look-see, etc... I WOULD VOLUNTEER TO WRITE THE TEMPLATES FOR YOU, I'm doing those anyway for my area site. I'd propose flat screen shots creating .jpg views for these template pages to reduce the overhead on folks visiting your site. They can get the whole enchillada with just one more mouse click. I'd be willing to do this work to reduce any costs to the folks in my local area for your services..

You could offer up these premade templates to bike shops and businesses in the local area as a revenue generator ($$). (free to .org groups?)

I've got plenty of ideas on this stuff. Perhaps we should talk, go for a ride, grab a bite to eat?

--zip
 

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#22 ·
Thanks for the suggestions and interest. I'll try to answer your questions. So the South Nevada trails we just added are a bit rough. Our rider down there has only been there a few months, and this was a first cut version of the map. The first version is always a bit off on names and difficulties. But it is much easier for us to make a basic map for the Garmin 800, so that we can ride it and only have to make notes on the differences (like, this should be expert not intermediate, this name is wrong, etc). We always GPS/Video map the trails, so that we don't have to remember too much, and just play back the video and watch a little icon move across the map. The more mistakes we made initially the more we have to stop and write down notes, instead of ride.

As far as website load time, it really doesn't make much difference as to the number of people accessing the site, as compared to the users bandwidth/cpu. All the tracks are connected, optimized, and verified using satellite imagery overlays. By optimized, we remove all unnecessary straight line points, and add in more points to make curves, and correct the lines for satellite drift. If a particular trail system is too dense, we can automatically remove points. We also have something else in the works for our mobile version which will be much faster. We have also run our database on the Amazon Cloud, and that works very well for performance, we just don't want to pay for the bandwidth, yet. So expect the map load time to be better as time goes on.

I have seen GPS visualizer and other tools like it. The main problem I notice with all of them is that they only can show one small trail system. They don't have the option to show all the trails of the world because of how they load the data, all on startup. We wrote the skidmap interface to allow us to load and unload trail systems as the user pans and to dynamically color tracks according to various user inputs in real-time (trail conditions, user ratings, etc.). This way, any user can look at multiple trail systems at once, and see which trail systems have the most bright green tracks (excellent rating), and go ride those first, or create a route that traverses the highest rated trails.

That said, it is easy to create what we call an "extract" which is a subset of the map to display. Park City uses our site to do this for example (Mountain Trails Foundation - Map). But even Park City map still exists as 5 or 6 trail systems that load/unload as you move the map, otherwise it would lock up most browsers if we tried to show all of them, but they are all intricately linked. The need to make a map/caching system was really a requirement for it to work there. We also like to show big endurance race courses, so that riders can see how the course traverses all the trail systems, which trails they cross, where the forks in the trails are, etc. The Park City P2P, crossed almost every trailsystem there in one race. You can see it here in this link:
The Skid Map

A lot of sites out there provide a launchable minimap of any one particular trail system, like
PahaSapaTrails.com

They appear to use a polygon to outline an area. Is this what you have in mind. If not, please post a link of a site that does what you are talking about, I'd be interested to really get an idea for how your template is to work.

So if you finally read down to here, you are really dedicated. And I'll tell you something more, the current skidmap site is old, well, the interface is old. We have been working on a new one for a good while which is less buggy, more socially engaged, and provides a way for a local to represent their organization on our site (name, link, logo) all shown geo-graphically and on trail summary panels. We also want to be a geo-portal which can be used to drive riders to external sites that have a more local focus with more detailed information. So our new interface does provide a way for a selected user to add their own links to individual trails (not a region or trail system though), so that they can link back to their own sites, even showing up in our search engine. We will be showing examples of some trail builders and imba trail organizations that are working with us on this on our facebook page soon (http://www.facebook.com/skidmap).

If you are interested in seeing our new test site or want to represent your area, send me an email at:

info@skidmap.com

Cheers
 
#24 ·
Hey...I'm kinda new here. It seems I'm missing something in the conversation.

There is a website: Mountain Bike Maps .com

It's pretty good many trail locations and is getting better. Only negative is they don't have GPS downloads. Although I have started keeping a library of my own.
 
#32 ·
Awesome!

Hey everyone! I am making Mountain Bike Maps.com

Check it out and let me know what you think . Keep in mind, it's FREE. and I am a one man band so it's ever evolving...

GPS Data possibly to come in a few months......
Great job on the website. One nitpicky observation by me. The trail system is cottonwood valley(not canyon.) Otherwise great stuff. Looking forward to more.
 
#34 ·
I thought it would be fun to build a Garmin 800 map of Nevada for both MTB and Roadies a like. Here is a snapshot. Basically all the trails are highlighted by difficulty, and you can see the RMT in purple because it is a paved trail. All the roads are de-emphasized in gray, except roads with bike lanes.



If anyone is interested in giving it a try and giving me some feedback, send me an email (info@skidmap.com) and let me know and I'll shoot you a free download link. It will work on the Edge 705 but you will need some additional instructions.

Also, I got a private message from one of the users here, but I don't have enough posts to respond, please send all inquires to "info@skidmap.com".

Cheers
 
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