TrailTrack
If you've ever found yourself trying to remember which summit that excellent photograph was taken on, or manually cross-referencing your GPS track against three different lists of classified hills, TrailTrack might just save you from that particular form of hillwalking admin by automatically working out which fells you've climbed and keeping your routes, statistics and memories in one sensibly organised place.
TrailTrack: Plan, Explore and Remember Days in the Hills
TrailTrack brings route planning, summit tracking and walking memories together in one place. Built specifically for the fells, mountains and hills of the UK and Ireland, it helps walkers decide where to go, keep an accurate record of where they have been and remember rather more than the final distance.
Generic fitness apps are very good at telling you that you exercised on Tuesday. They are less useful when you want to know which summits you crossed, how they count towards the Munros or Wainwrights, and where you put the photographs from that sunny half-hour on top of Helvellyn before the clag came in.
Made for the way hill walkers think
Hill walkers tend to plan around places rather than workouts. We think about particular summits, ridges, classifications, weather conditions and whether there is somewhere sensible to leave the car without upsetting a farmer.
TrailTrack reflects that.
You can search for a summit or browse the walking regions of the UK and Ireland, then explore the hills by area and classification. Individual fell pages bring useful information together, including height, prominence, mountain range, nearby summits, grid references, photographs and the various lists to which the hill belongs.
That last part can become surprisingly complicated. One summit may be a Wainwright, Hewitt, Birkett, Marilyn and several other things at the same time. TrailTrack sorts that out in the background, leaving the walker to decide whether climbing it sounds like a pleasant day out—or the sort of decision they will question halfway up.
Plan the walk
The route planner allows users to build a walk by adding places and summits to the map. TrailTrack follows the available footpaths and tracks, updating the route as waypoints are added or changed.
Distance, ascent and estimated time are calculated along the way, giving the walker a useful idea of what they are getting themselves into before the boots go on. It is generally better to discover that a route includes 1,200 metres of ascent while sitting at home with a cup of tea.
The map is designed around walking, with a clear TrailTrack Light view and a satellite option when seeing the landscape from above is more helpful. The route remains easy to follow without disappearing beneath unnecessary information.
Finished routes can be saved to a TrailTrack account or downloaded as GPX files for use on a phone, watch or separate GPS device. We do not expect everybody to abandon the Garmin they have spent years learning how to operate. Nobody has that sort of time.
Record where you went
TrailTrack can record a walk as it happens or import activities from existing files and services such as Strava. Common walking and activity formats are supported, including GPX, TCX and FIT.
Once an activity is added, TrailTrack works out the route, distance, ascent, descent, duration and pace. It also deals with the usual oddities found in GPS data, such as wandering elevation readings and occasional bursts of speed which suggest the walker briefly achieved flight.
More importantly, TrailTrack works out exactly which fells you walked over.
When an activity is recorded or imported, it checks the route against the summits along the way, identifies the hills you reached and adds them to your Summit Log automatically. There is no need to retrace the route afterwards, compare it with several different lists or try to remember whether you actually crossed the summit or merely went very close to it.
This is one of our favourite parts of TrailTrack. We are not sure anybody else does it quite like this, and it removes a surprising amount of work from keeping an accurate record of your walks.
Your progress is updated across every relevant classification, so the same summit can count towards the Wainwrights, Hewitts, Birketts, Marilyns and any other lists to which it belongs.
TrailTrack also keeps a record of repeat ascents. A hill only counts once towards completing a classification, but your personal log shows how many times you have climbed it. For plenty of walkers, knowing that they have been up Helvellyn twelve times—or Catbells forty-seven times—is every bit as interesting as ticking it off for the first time.
Summits can also be logged manually. Technology is useful, but it cannot help if the phone remained in the car—or if somebody only remembered to start recording approximately three miles into the walk.
Remember the actual day
Statistics are useful, but they rarely explain why a walk mattered.
TrailTrack allows completed activities to become part of a personal walking journal. Users can add photographs and write about the day, keeping the route, summits, figures and memories together.
Over time, this creates a chronological record of life in the hills. You can look back and see not only how far you walked, but who was there, what the weather did and why you apparently took seventeen photographs of the same patch of cloud.
This is an important part of TrailTrack. It is not simply another place to store exercise data. It is somewhere to keep the days themselves—the excellent ones, the difficult ones and the ones where the main achievement was locating the pub before it stopped serving food.
Useful information before setting off
The Mountain Forecast lets walkers search for a particular UK summit or check the weather at their current location. A valley forecast is not always especially helpful when the intended destination is several hundred metres higher and currently inside a cloud.
Forecasts are there to support sensible planning rather than replace it. Mountain weather remains mountain weather, and no website can guarantee what it will be doing when you reach the top. Occasionally, the mountain itself does not appear to know.
TrailTrack also includes a growing collection of walking guides. These cover subjects including navigation, equipment, weather, hill classifications, mountain rescue, landscape, wildlife and the people who have shaped walking culture.
They answer practical questions, along with a few that tend to occur halfway through a walk—such as why every other hill appears to be called Pike, Dodd or Law, and whether trekking poles are genuinely useful or simply two more things to leave in the porch.
Share routes, advice and days out
Walkers can share completed activities through the TrailTrack community, including the route, photographs and story of the day. Other users can follow, comment on and save walks which interest them.
The Mountain Forum provides space for wider conversations about routes, equipment, conditions, challenges and anything else connected with life in the hills.
No one understands a walker quite like another walker. We may prefer different hills, different kit and very different definitions of “an early start”, but we all have the outdoors in common. The forum gives like-minded people somewhere to talk, ask questions, share experience and help one another.
Walking knowledge is often passed from one person to another, and it is helpful to have somewhere for that knowledge to live beyond a social media post which vanishes by lunchtime.
It also means there is always somebody available to explain why their preferred route up a particular hill is the only sensible one—or the one to avoid at all costs.
We are TrailTrack
TrailTrack is not a client project we handed over and walked away from. It is ours. We created it, we run it and, most importantly, we use it ourselves.
As hill walkers living and working in the Lake District, we could see that plenty of apps recorded exercise, but very few genuinely understood a day in the hills. Most were designed primarily for road runners or cyclists. They could tell us how far we had travelled, but not necessarily which fells we had crossed, how those summits counted towards the Wainwrights or where to find a mountain forecast for the place we were actually heading.
We wanted something made around the way hill walkers think: routes, summits, classifications, changing weather, photographs and the memories attached to a particular day. We needed it for our own walks, and nothing else quite brought all of that together.
Because we are both the team and the people using TrailTrack, we can look at every part of it together. We handle the software, mobile experience, mapping, visual design, written guides, community and marketing ourselves. Decisions are not made in isolation because each part needs to work with the rest.
It is a complicated piece of software, but using it ourselves keeps us focused on what is genuinely useful. A feature may sound very clever while everyone is sitting comfortably at a desk; the real test is whether it still makes sense halfway up a mountain with wet boots, cold hands and a phone battery which has chosen that precise moment to become concerning.
Living in the Lake District also means the subject is never particularly far away. The hills are where we test ideas, notice problems and work out what TrailTrack should do next. We are not trying to imagine what walkers might want from a distance. We are walkers, building the tool we want to use.
Bringing everything together
TrailTrack involves mapping, GPS processing, activity data, summit classifications, weather, written guides, personal journals and community features. There is plenty going on behind the screen.
The aim, however, is simple: help somebody find a hill, plan the walk, record what happened and keep the memory.
We handled the software, design, content and marketing together because each part affects the others. The map needs to work with the route planner. The completed route needs to update the Summit Log. The activity needs to become part of the journal. None of it should feel as though several unrelated tools have been persuaded to share a navigation menu.
That is the same thinking we bring to client projects. We take the time to understand the subject, the people using it and the problem it genuinely needs to solve. Then we deal with the complicated parts so the finished thing does not feel complicated at all.
TrailTrack is the sort of project we love: a good idea, a real problem and plenty of awkward details to untangle. If you have something similar taking shape—whether it is carefully planned or still written on the back of an envelope—we would be very happy to hear about it.
We cannot promise to make the idea less ambitious. We can help make it real.
Visit TrailTrack (The Best Ever Outdoor Hiking Website)
Does TrailTrack automatically log which summits I've climbed?
Yes. When you record or import a walk, TrailTrack checks your route against its database and automatically identifies which summits you reached, adding them to your Summit Log. This works across all relevant classifications like Wainwrights, Munros, Hewitts and Marilyns without you having to manually check lists afterwards.
Can I download routes from TrailTrack to use on my Garmin or GPS watch?
Yes. You can download any route you've created as a GPX file for use on your phone, watch or separate GPS device. TrailTrack is designed to work alongside whatever navigation equipment you already use.
What makes TrailTrack different from regular fitness apps?
TrailTrack is built specifically for UK and Ireland hill walkers rather than general exercise. It understands summits, mountain classifications, hill lists, and keeps your photos and memories together with route data—not just distance and time statistics.