Garmin’s New Trail Finder Sounds Good, but It Doesn’t Have My Favorite Routes

Garmin has launched a new feature in its Connect app (the companion app you use when you sync your watch to your phone). It’s called Garmin Trails, and it’s designed to help you find hiking trails near you. With a Connect+ subscription, you can even sync directions for those trails to your map-enabled watch.

Sounds pretty cool. Unfortunately, the selection of tracks at the start is rather disappointing – it doesn’t even offer me the chance to try my own favourite tracks.

How to Access Garmin Trails

You don’t need a Connect+ subscription to find routes, filter by features, and view routes and route overviews — it’s all free in the regular Connect app, whether on your phone or throughthe Connect web interface . If you have a Garmin device, you already have a login for these services.

To find Garmin Trails in Connect, tap the More menu in the app, find and tap Training and Planning , then scroll to Garmin Trails . You’ll be presented with a map of suggested trails. Zoom in on the map and tap the little hiker icons to see each individual trail, or search by name in the search bar above. Unfortunately, the search results aren’t sorted in any logical way, such as by distance. If I search for a trail name near me in Pennsylvania, I see results from Maine and Maryland before results from Pennsylvania.

There is also a filter icon that allows you to limit results by distance from your current location, elevation gain on the route, as well as rating, difficulty, route type and features.

Features that can be filtered include:

• Dog friendly

• There are no dogs.

• Waterfalls

• Lakes

• Rivers

• Oceans

• Mountaineering

• Steep sections

• Forest

• Flowers

• Suitable for children

• Permission required

• Water sources

• Reaches the heights

• Uneven road

Currently only the US and a few European countries are supported.

At launch, trails are only available in the United States and four European countries: Austria, Germany, Liechtenstein, and Switzerland. “New trails will be added periodically in different regions,” Garmin’s support page says.

Garmin’s original announcement didn’t mention this limitation, so much of the chatter I see online about it is about frustration among users outside of that handful of countries. For example, this writer in the UK calls the feature “NoTrails” (a reference to competitor AllTrails, get it?)

In the US I definitely see some traces, but not enough to make this feature particularly useful.

I just don’t see many paths.

I enjoy running and hiking trails, and I live near a county park that is literally riddled with hiking, running, and mountain biking trails. There’s a local trail running group that meets six times a week, seemingly always in a different location (I’m sure they repeat their favorites, but there’s a lot of variety). So what does Garmin Trails have in its database for my area? Here’s the Garmin on the left, and the county trails site on the right:

Kudos to Garmin for being aware of the Rachel Carson Trail , the long one that shows up as a black line. It’s long, 46 miles, and fairly well-known in the area. Garmin lists it as a series of short segments. They’re correctly labeled as “hard” in difficulty.

But there are two trails in the entire North Park? I’m not even sure how anyone could know about the Orange and Green Trails without knowing about all the others in the park. Where is the Red Trail with its red and blue line and all those switchbacks? Where is the flat half-mile trail by the nature center that I always took my kids on when they were little? Where is the White Trail that circles the baseball fields?

As for these Orange and Green trails, they are both marked with the correct distance, but they are also marked as “easy,” which is definitely not true. Last week, I did a trail run that included all of the Orange trail and part of the Green. It was about five miles long and had an elevation gain of 800 feet . It is not an easy trail at all.

I asked a Garmin rep where the trail data came from, and he said Garmin used “various sources and our internal mapping team.” As far as I can tell, they’re not copied from AllTrails or any other source, or at least not directly. (It might be better if they were; AllTrails has a green trail that’s more reasonably labeled moderate rather than easy.)

Looking through other areas I’m familiar with, I found that the most iconic trails anywhere are in the database, so the tool isn’t useless , just incomplete (hopefully temporarily). Several of the gorge trails I remember most from Ithaca, NY are there. Yellowstone National Park has many marked trails.

I asked fellow Lifehacker writer Daniel Oropeza to look for trails in areas he knows, and he compared the Three Sisters Falls area on Garmin and AllTrails. Garmin has one trail to the falls, but there are actually four; Garmin has 19 trails in its larger database, while AllTrails has 143.

Viewing routes is free, but you’ll have to pay to have them sent to your watch.

Garmin Trails appears to be the sweetener for the new Connect+ subscription tier . The Trails feature itself is free, but only Connect+ (or Maps+, Garmin’s other offering) subscribers can send trail routes from that database to their devices. Compatible devices include anything that supports trails , like the latest Fenix, Forerunner, and Instinct watches (and Edge cycling computers). Maps-enabled watches, like the new Forerunner 970 , would be a natural fit for this new feature.

Courses also appear to be a slightly different version of the Courses feature that Garmin has had for a while. (You can find Courses at this link if you have a Garmin account.) Courses can be private or user-created; there is currently no option for users to create a course. This means that there can be multiple versions of the same course, as well as courses that don’t follow a specific course — say, someone ran part of the Orange and part of the Green because that’s what worked for them on the day the course was created.

If Garmin Trails adds more trails, it could end up being a useful feature. Trail ratings, comments, and filters are handy. But AllTrails already has those features, and you can download AllTrails trails to your Garmin watch if you subscribe to AllTrails Plus , which costs $35.99/year — cheaper than Garmin Connect+, which costs $6.99/month or $69.99/year.

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