Live Trails enables people to find, experience, and benefit from the latest hiking reports, pictures, and trail updates. Users can build their own network of outdoor friends to do, share, and discuss outdoor trips. Live trails also simplifies management of your trail reports and sharing them with others.

You don’t need to sign up to view most reports. However, sign up allows you to:
1. have your own trail pages.
2. build your friend network.
3. download GPS tracks.
4. post reports
5. organize events
6. simplify report management.
7. track your statistics.
8. share your best pictures
9. see all public photos.
10. add comments.
11. experience all future live trails features

Not at all. Live Trails is for everyone and for all the trails. We recognize that every trail has its own uniqueness and beauty that people can capture on their own way. Our system was built from the very start to recognize this fact. Our database includes all levels of trail difficulty. We treat them all similarly. We have also chose distance as the main score for people rather than other metrics such as elevation. It is how much you hike rather how difficult it is. We recognize the experience of the people who do advance trails and how important it is. However, we also recognize the experiences that come of doing other type of trails. This is what Live Trails is about.

No, your password is not disclosed to us. The login window is generated by Facebook. We don’t have an access to it. Facebook will create a session when you login. It completely controls the login process. Facebook adminstrators have verified that our application conforms to their regulations.

It is best we delegate this service to a third party that specializes on providing account management. It will be more secure. We can also focus on providing our own services. Facebook does a great job in providing secured and personalized account management. Many people also have Facebook accounts. It is easer to login using your existing username and password than creating new ones. It also allows you to share your reports and pictures easily with your Facebook friends.

We don't save in our database any data from your Facebook account other than your Facebook ID. We also don't post anything on your Feed without your consent.

It is likely that you are logged in but the page has not been refreshed. We don't know whether it is a problem in the browser, Facebook, or in our software. In the meantime, if this problem occurs, please refresh the page manually.

The issue is happening because the third-party cookies is disabled in your browser. Without it Facebook will not able to validate your session and you will stay logged off.
To enable cookies in Firefox:
1. Click Preferences > Options.
2. Click Privacy in the top panel.
3. Select the checkbox labeled 'Accept third-party cookies.'
4. Click OK.
As far as we know this problem only happens on Firefox. If you have another browser on your Mac such as Safari, it will likely work without any change.

Geotagging is to find where the photos were taken. It is done by getting latitude and longitude data into your photos.

It is easy. Add your photos and GPS track and the geotags will be generated automatically using your normal digital camera.

Everytime you take a picture, you digital camera records the time the photo is taken. The GPS device also timestamps the coordinates it registers. When you add your pictures and the GPS track of a trail, the timestamps of the photos and the gps track will be correlated and the geotags will be generated.

It is either no timestamps in your photos or no timestamps in the gps track. Only Flickr and Picasa provide the taken date of the pictures. Facebook doesn't provide it. There is also chance that timestamps were removed from your GPS track file. Google Earth does that when it generates .kml or .kmz files. It is best to upload .gpx files.

Yes, hit on the ‘Next Set’ and the next ten best pictures, if they are available, will be shown.

It is done automatically. Our system rates a report based on its average daily views, votes, and its picture votes.

The colors reflect the status of the trail based on the last report that has been added. The colors might not reflect the current condition of the trail if no recent report was submitted. Here is a description for the colors:
1. Green: the report states that the hike was successfully done less than one month.
2. Red: the report states that the hike was unsuccessfully done regardless of the age of the report.
3. Orange: the report states the hike was successfully done over one month ago, which might not reflect the current state of the trail.

Any report has a value, including the ones that have no album or comments. Readers still benefit from just knowing that it was doable or not. Put yourself in the mindeset of someone who has not been to the trail and wishing to do the same trip the following week,... "what would you have wanted to know?". Consider the following:
1. Personal Experience.
2. Picture albums such as pictures of the trail and views seen from it (Picture descriptions help).
3. Trail conditions such as snow, overgrown, avalanche danger, and routefinding.
4. Road conditions: 4x4 required, lack of markings, and key junctions.
5. GPS track and info.

You can choose to make your page public, protected, or private.
A public page is a page that you want to share with everyone.
A protected page is a page that you only want to share with Facebook users.
A private page is a page that you only want to share with your friends.
You can change this setting at any time. However, please remember that all pages have a public URL.
To change your page setting:
1. Click on 'Settings'.
2. Choose Public to make your page available to anyone. Choose Proctected to make your accessable only by Facebook Users. Chooose Private to keep it available only to your friends.
3. Click Save.

Some popular trails have their own names (e.g. Ground Grind and BCMC). In this case, you need to use these names. However, many trails don’t have names. We have created a naming convention to make trails more understandable, easier to find, and reduce duplicates. Consider consulting major publications such as the backroads mapbook for the most common name of the trail you are creating.

A trail name is composed of four elements. The first element is required and other three are optional:
1. Landmark element (required) is the identifier of the main distinctive landmark that the trail goes to such as a lake or peak. If the landmark has a synonym, add the synonym after the landmark separated by a slash.
2. from Trailhead, via Intermediate point, to trailend elements (optional): In many cases, they are the starting and ending parking lots.
3. in Park name: this element is used when the landmark or the trail name is commonly used and not distinctive enough to identify the trail.
4. One way, roundtrip, or loop elements (optional) which describes if the trail is done one way, roundtrip, or a loop.
The second and the third elements must always be set inside parentheses. The four element must only be surrounded by parentheses when the second or third element is not defined.
Examples of legitimate names are:
1. Landmark
2. Landmark (from Trailhead)
3. Landmark (Trailhead to Trailend)
4. Landmark (Trailhead to Trailend) one way
5. Landmark (one way)
6. Landmark/Synonym
7. Landmark (in Park)

Here are the rules of choosing the right elements:

1. If there is only one trail or if it is a popular trail to a destination, only the Landmark element need to be specified. It will be named after the destination. For example, the trail to Garibaldi Lake will be named Garibaldi Lake.
2. If there are more than one trail to the destination: define the trailhead location in the title. For example, the trail to the Lions that starts from Cypress Parking Lots will be named Lions (from Cypress Parking Lots).
3. If the trail ends at a different place than the trailhead, define the trailhead and trailend elements. For example, The Hanes Valley trail that starts from Lynn Park and ends at Grouse Chalet will be named Hanes Valley (Lynn Park to Grouse Chalet).
4. If the trail loops through two popular destinations, name the landmark after the two destinations and define the 'loop' element. For example, Lions and Harvey Loop. The same rule can be applied for more than two destinations.
5. If there are no distinctive destination, use the park name. For example, Grouse (from McKay Trail, Via Baden Powell, to BCMC).

GPX, KML, and KMZ for uploads and KML or KMZ for downloads. If you have a photo album, GPX works the best in geotagging your pictures. KML or KMZ may strip out the timestamps of the coordinates. It depends on your GPS convertor that you use.

KML, or Keyhole Markup Language, is a file format for modeling and storing geographic data such as points, lines, images, and polygons for display in Google Earth, Google Maps and other applications.
This file format is becoming increasingly popular for mapping tools. It is supported by Google, Yahoo, and Adobe.

KMZ stands for KML-Zipped. It is the default format for KML because it is a compressed version of the file. One of the more powerful features of KMZ is that it allows any images you use be zipped up within the KMZ file. You can share these images directly without having to externally link to them in the Internet. For KMZ files without images, the file size will be much smaller than the equivalent KML file.

There is a number of applications available on the Web that can do the conversions. We find GPSBabel as the most comprehensive one.

1. Compress your KML file using WinZip.
2. Change the file extension to .kmz.
There is good chance that the compressed file will be less than the limit. You can also filter your coordinates by time, space, or points.