Understanding our footprint in wild places.
A project of Adirondack Wilderness Advocates
TrailCount builds tools for exploring wild land, made for the people who care for it — at a public agency or a private land trust. Explore how many people use a trail and when, how far a place sits from the nearest road, who holds the land around it, and how steep the ground is. Good stewardship rests on evidence like this, and on a map it is easy to read — so decisions follow the land, not anecdote. The work begins in New York’s Adirondack Park.
- Measure unobtrusively. Battery-powered counters at the trailhead log each passing hiker and report in daily over cellular — no cameras, no wires, nothing asked of visitors.
- Explore the whole landscape. Visitor counts are one layer. Remoteness, private ownership, and trail grade are others, each mapped from public data.
- Protect what is pristine. Crowded trails and shrinking remote core show up early, so stewardship — trail hardening, education, rerouting, protection — goes where the land needs it first.
Explore
Five views of the Adirondack Park. The remoteness, private-land, steepness, and work-plan maps are open to anyone; trail usage needs a sign-in.
Trail usage
Counters at the trailhead and a dashboard to read them: usage heat along the trails, graphs of when people come, and totals you can export.
The demo runs on simulated data; the live dashboard shows real counts. Request access.
Remoteness
How far each acre is from the nearest road, ATV trail, snowmobile trail, or motorized water. Close a road or draw a new one and watch remote core grow or fragment.
Private lands
The other half of the Park: who holds the large private landholdings, grouped by parent company, with APA land class, conservation easements, and forest-tax commitments.
Trail steepness
DEC hiking trails colored by grade, computed from USGS elevation data. Filter by unit and trail type, or hide everything gentler than a grade you choose.
DEC work plans
Forest Preserve project work plans since 2022, placed on the trail or unit they name, over every DEC trail and the APA state land map. Filter by trail type and fiscal year.
An experiment. Locations are inferred from names, not official DEC locations.
TrailCount is built in collaboration with RIT senior-project teams.
Questions? contact@trailcount.io