Trail Directory

[Shaggz]

While the trail directory is a great resource, we realize that there are some improvements we can make and trails to add.

So far, this is what I have:
1 - Give each of the "Allamuchys' their own identity;
2 - Add Wharton;
3 - Add Lebanon;
4 - Add Baldplate (I have information from STB22)
5 - Work on non-NJ riding areas section
6 - High Mountain, Wayne - information coming from Will

Does anyone have GPS coordinates for the Parking Areas for 2 & 3? Are there other trail systems that we are missing? Are there trails in the directory that should come out?

 

[anrothar]

not sure you want to get this in depth, but:

berkshire wildlife management area
rockaway river/weldon brook wmas
sparta mountain/hamburg mtn wmas

it sort of goes on and on. not sure it's necessary to have everywhere listed as well. maybe just mahlon and surrounding wma's, or allamuchy and surrounding wma's.... maybe surrounding wma's should jsut be a topic.

 

[Kirt]

I think breaking out each WMA is a great idea. The more info the better including GPS maps of each if possible.

 

[Shaggz]

If that is the route we want to go, again, I will need some GPS coordinates for parking at each WMA. I wonder if the "other" Norm could assist in this, as well.

 

[anrothar]

it's a daunting task...

http://www.njfishandwildlife.com/wmaland.htm

 

[DANSPANK]

Since the list of trails will be getting bigger it may help (me) decide how god a trail is if there was a rating system too. Crankfire.com does a great job of letting perspective riders know what they could be in for and how others enjoyed it. I have to drive about an hour to get to the nearest trails. If I was driving any further then it would be great to know that the locals rated the trails a 4/5 or something so that I knew I'd have fun.

Make Sense? No? Mission accomplsihed.

 

[tlnj]

Since the list of trails will be getting bigger it may help (me) decide how god a trail is if there was a rating system too. Crankfire.com does a great job of letting perspective riders know what they could be in for and how others enjoyed it. I have to drive about an hour to get to the nearest trails. If I was driving any further then it would be great to know that the locals rated the trails a 4/5 or something so that I knew I'd have fun.

Make Sense? No? Mission accomplsihed.

Totally agree. A trail rating/review section, similar to mtbr.com would be great.

 

[VelocityBoy]

Since the list of trails will be getting bigger it may help (me) decide how god a trail is if there was a rating system too. Crankfire.com does a great job of letting perspective riders know what they could be in for and how others enjoyed it. I have to drive about an hour to get to the nearest trails. If I was driving any further then it would be great to know that the locals rated the trails a 4/5 or something so that I knew I'd have fun.

Make Sense? No? Mission accomplsihed.

Good idea. At least, type of terrain (hilly, rocky, mostly singletrack, fireroads)
would help.

 

[clarkenstein]

would a pseudo difficulty rating system work too, maybe like a ski area, green circle, blue square, and black diamond?

i know each place is different, and it would be real difficult to give an overall area an exact rating (because there are easy parts and hard parts to all trails) but to give an overall difficulty rating, maybe a difficulty 'feel' to the place... like a place like parvin in comparison to the sourlands... i would give an overall green circle to parvin and a black diamond to the sourlands... chimney rock and hartshorne, maybe a blue square.

just so new folks can get an idea of what they are in for... probably really hard and subject to TONS of debate... maybe you could include it in the reviews of the trail section so each rider reviewing could give their own difficulty rating...

 

[dualfisted]

doesn't anyone use maps or mapquest anymore??/

What's this GPS thingy??? It must be amazing that I've never gotten lost on a roadtrip without this new-fangled gadget-tronics, haha. I don't own a cell phone, my bike is 8spd and fully rigid, must be gettin' old, ha. Anyway, a trail rating system would be cool, and any additional 411 on trails and locations and trailheads is always better than too little. Peace out cub scouts.

 

[Norm]

I think the best you could do is a general range of ratings. Also, it probably needs to be done by a collection of people who have ridden all over the state. That way you get a better general average. On MTBR you see trails rated 1-5. How is that possible, to have 2 people rate the same trail a 1 and a 5?

 

[clarkenstein]

to expand and improve on mtbr's rating system... add some stuff, like a singlespeed rating - is it cool for SS'ing or 'bring your gearie'. HT vs FS. local eats in the area or you'll leave starving. probably a lot more to build into the site, but in all seriousness, that's what makes this site so cool in comparison to the 'mtbr'.

 

[Norm]

We've bounced around some of those ideas - the beer/food one and the SS one are new though. So good stuff on that, very nice. The more robust we make the trail directory entries the more useful it is.

 

[VelocityBoy]

We've bounced around some of those ideas - the beer/food one and the SS one are new though. So good stuff on that, very nice. The more robust we make the trail directory entries the more useful it is.

How about, for some input from all corners, start up separate threads on eats/beer & "ss friendliness"?

 

[tlnj]

I think the best you could do is a general range of ratings. Also, it probably needs to be done by a collection of people who have ridden all over the state. That way you get a better general average. On MTBR you see trails rated 1-5. How is that possible, to have 2 people rate the same trail a 1 and a 5?

Well, I don't think it should be a "review by committee" situation where a few people do all the ratings. Let everyone have a say! I think that despite some random discrepencies (i.e., 1 and 5 ratings on the same trail), the mtbr rating system has been effective.

In dealing with ratings or any other type of statistic, the majority rules. Outliers rarely have any type of significant impact. This pretty much marginalizes random bent out of shape idiots who rate places like ringwood a "1"

Plus, in the end, what is a rating? It's an opinion. This means that we should not be subjected to the opinions of a few riders, but to anyone who cares to chime in.

 

[Norm]

Well we do have an entire message board with forums for each park to talk about them. That discussion would probably be pretty appropriate there, no?

 

[tlnj]

Well we do have an entire message board with forums for each park to talk about them. That discussion would probably be pretty appropriate there, no?

Yes, that discussion is appropriate there, but that's not the point. If you have hand-picked reviewers, it just really waters things down. It also makes this Website feel like an exlusive little club run by a committee, rather than a public forum/community. Why do I trust these guys' opinions over the opinions of the general population? Frankly, I wouldn't. Plus, if you go about it the way you're talking about, you're gonna miss out on what the locals [and a lot of other people] have to say, and those are the guys who really know the trails.

I don't know. Maybe to be fair, I need to hear more details about your idea, but as it stands now, it sounds like too much of a hands-on approach.

 

[Crankfire]

Oh man, I have been struggling with this very question for a while now, still don't have much of an answer though. Figure I would share some of my thoughts in hopes of some good dialog / idea exchanges.

Currently the "system" we use on Crankfire is pretty much based on what the single user that entered the trail entry thinks is appropriate. Which is more or less ski area classifications (plus a "pay to play" and "evil" rating). I am not a super fan of this approach. Granted people can comment away and generally rate each place 1 to 10 as a whole, it is all still a way too subjective and vague for me.

So I have 2.5, maybe almost 3 plans so far:

1) I recently came upon IMBA's trail difficulty rating guide:

http://www.imba.com/resources/trail_building/itn_17_4_trail_difficulty.html

Which I think is an excellent starting point. I was thinking to allow every user to put in a vote using these criteria and then tally these up on the trail page - something like 75% of people voted this trail has "black diamond" type stuff within (or whatever).

2) Similar to the above approach, use multiple basic 1 to 10 ratings on several factors, for example: Technicality, Hilliness, Stuntiness, Distance-ness, etc..

2.5) A combination of 1 or 2 and jamming some crunched data from gps tracks uploaded. In theory, I calculate average grades and elevation changes, that should count for something? Probably not though, my math is poor.

3) "Tags" or a "Tag Cloud" approach. Give users a bunch of options to choose from and calculate whats going on with that. For example: Roots, Rocky, Hills, Singletrack, Epic, Doubletrack, Scenic, Facilities, etc.. If enough people "voted", a tag cloud could be generated? We kinda wrote the tag cloud thing off though, forgot why....

4) The craziest idea was to try to implement a netflix type deal, where one could calculate somethign along the lines of "Users like you rated this trail..." I have no friggin clue how to do that, and I imagine you would need a pretty sizable dataset to pull that one off.

Issues: 1 and 2 are still really subjective, and 3 and 4 would both require large datasets to extract anything statistically meaningful.

I think that pretty much everything that has been shaking around in my head.

 

[clarkenstein]

rating is difficult.

the climbing scale works great, but it gets broken down a bit too much sometimes, and also varies from location to location.

for example, gunks boulder problems are generally 'generous' in their ratings (there have been quite a few downgrades from V9 to V7 for example), but the climbs are generally rated stiff (a 5.5 at the gunks can be a 5.7 somewhere else).

i like that cloud idea - keeping roots, rock gardens, hills in mind. thats the cool thing about mtn biking - there are so many things to make it difficult, whether it be hills, technical terrain, or the mixture of both.

but how about a hybrid of the two ideas mentioned above. maybe have the mtbnj race team rate the trails - to kind of give the trail ratings an 'anchor' if you will... and then allow everyone to put in their .02 as well - so you get locals opinions, etc, see where the two meet, and voila, a relatively objective rating from the public combined with a kind of 'control' group. (and you can do what ski magazine does with new ski reviews - a 'meet the testers' thing, so you can see what bike was ridden on the trail, and who the rider is, just to get an idea of where they are coming from).

sometimes locals have funny thoughts on trails - they consider something really hard, because sometimes they never venture out to other spots and try new stuff, and other times they can dial in some crazy technical feature, and now call it 'easy'. with that in mind, the race team ratings (or whoever gets thrown into this kind of a project) could even the locals' biases. i mean if you only rode six mile, a climb a chimney rock could be insane to you, but if you were riding allamuchy all the time, chimney rock could come off pretty flat.

:hmmm:

 

[Norm]

Lots of good stuff to chew on here.

I don't know. Maybe to be fair, I need to hear more details about your idea, but as it stands now, it sounds like too much of a hands-on approach.

More details about my idea would be that we all have day jobs that keep us out of the house from 7:00 am until 6:00 pm so whatever is easy works best 🙂 Well except Jake and he wouldn't know a DB front-end if it bit him on the ass.

OK, but seriously, there's a lot of work involved so whatever seems to make the most bang for the least effort would be the best way to go. It could be an open discussion on a park-by-park basis, where the regulars would contribute and you would come up with a general consensus. Then over time maybe you refine it. Hard to say, I'm making this up as I go along. Crankfire has some good thoughts but some of them reek of effort.

Also I have a fundamental problem giving random poster X the same voice-weight as, say, Frank's opinion of Allaire. So how do you weight user ratings? Just adds more difficulty. Ideally, having a user ratings system on the reviews like Amazon books would be great. And highly rated users get more say in whatever ratings you come up with.

Lots of stuff to talk about, different directions to go, many of which involve astounding amounts of programming but could be an interesting challenge.