From Trailguru
The principal goal of Trailguru is to make finding and sharing routes easier. This was born out of the frustration that finding information about a outdoor trips is one of the most challenging and time consuming activities in preparing for a trip. How many times have you searched and searched for the right paper map for a region that you want to visit and not been able to find one? How many times have you squinted at a topo map trying to figure out if you should even consider attempting to ride a section on a mountain bike? Or how long it should take complete a trail section as a hike? The Trailguru project aims to fix this by combining GPS track data from multiple outings to produce a comprehensive route database.
For example, look at this composite map produced by Trailguru:
In addition to the base Google Maps data, this map shows a user submitted track for the famous mountain biking Flume Trail near Lake Tahoe, in this case is highlighted in yellow, which indicates that it is a GPS track that has been submitted by a user.
You might also notice that there is a more stable red line that follows this track. This is the computed trail segment that Trailguru has generated from this track and others over the same route and the red color indicates that the principal activity that users have done over this route is Mountain Biking. The great thing is that as more people ride this route the more detailed the data for this trail segment will become:
 Trailguru takes many GPS tracks... |  ...and produces a smooth trail segment |
‘’’Trailguru’’’ is designed to be used as much from Google Earth as it is from the web. In fact, the model that works best when you are looking for a new route is to use Google Earth to examine the area you are interested in and then jump over to the Trailguru web site to build a route that you can download to your GPS. To browse Trailguru through Google Earth, you first need to install Google Earth and second, download the Trailguru feed for Google Earth. With this, you can then navigate to a location in Google Earth and Trailguru will automatically provide trail information for that view:
Like in the Google Maps example, in Google Earth the trail segments are marked up by color to indicate the predominant activity type for this trail segment. So in the above, red indicates a mountain bike ride, orange a road bike ride, and so on. Google Earth enables you to browse by location with fantastic ease and then zoom in and explore a particular area in more detail once you have identified something of interest. The Google Earth view also provides a much better feel for the trail -- compare the level of detail of this view of the same Flume Trail in Google Earth vs. Google Maps:
Finally, Trailguru also automatically computes and stores time and altitude statistics from submitted GPS tracks to give people planning a route a rough rule of thumb of how long it should take to complete this segment. This information is contained on the trail segment's detail page, which you can reach from the Trailguru icon on each trail segment in Google Earth.
All of this from comes from simply carrying a GPS on your next time out and recording GPS tracks. If you are a contributing member, thanks again for all of your previous contributions. If not, have a read on how to help out by carrying a GPS on your next outing and then, when you get back, use Post Track on the menu at the top of every Trailguru page to help us expand our coverage.