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Close the catalog data gap with AllTrails and Strava #1002

Description

@glennmichael123

Problem

Measured against AllTrails and Strava, our gap is not the feature list — it is that the catalog holds 596,556 trails and almost none of them carry the data someone opens a trail page to read.

What was measured

400 trails sampled live from production on 25 Sep 2026, at offsets 0, 60k, 200k and 400k of the catalog — a straight cut through the middle, not a worst case.

Field Coverage
Elevation gain 0 / 400
Star rating 0 / 400
Any review 0 / 400
Non-stock photo 0 / 400
Dogs policy 1 / 400
Surface 233 / 400 (58%)

Difficulty across the sample: 310 easy, 21 moderate, 69 hard — graded from length alone, because ascent is missing.

A second sample of the first 200 in the default ordering was barely better: 8/200 with elevation, 5/200 with a real photo.

What that looks like on a page

/trail/105902 (Theodore Solomons Trail) today: "Illustrative photo", elevation gain "Not recorded", a generated description ending "Mapped by the OpenStreetMap community", 0 reviews, 0 records. /trails opens sorted longest-first, so the first screen is the North Country Trail at 1,161 miles, the Grand Enchantment at 1,036 and the Iditarod at 996 — every one of them graded HARD.

Sources for the comparison

  • Strava's own feature and subscription page.
  • AllTrails' help centre (Plus and Peak benefit articles, feature index) — alltrails.com refuses automated browsers, so their support site stands in for the product tour.
  • Wildloop from this repository and from the live API.

The work

Four fixes, in order. The first two are the same problem, and three of the four run against machinery that already exists here.

Backlog behind that

Not filed separately yet — say if any of these should be.

What AllTrails has and we do not: conditions forecast (temperature, precipitation, snow depth, air quality) beside our community reports; offline download of a park or a drawn area rather than one trail; waypoints and off-route alerts while recording; park pages; points of interest; custom and shareable lists; sending routes out to Garmin and COROS; printed maps. Peak adds 3D maps, a multi-day route assistant, smart re-routing, plant/insect identification and community heatmaps.

What Strava has and we do not: goals of any kind — the concept does not exist in the codebase; progress and fitness over time; AI activity summaries; finish-time predictions; routes generated from recorded activity volume; Local Legend.

What neither of them has: the territory game, and a trail catalog sitting next to clubs, events and challenges. That is the reason to exist — and it only works on top of a catalog people trust.

Activity

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