Product tour

Trail-use intelligence for wild places

TrailCount pairs rugged, solar-friendly trail counters with a cloud platform that turns raw hiker detections into decisions: where pressure is building, which trailheads carry the load, and how use moves with the seasons. This short tour walks through every page of the dashboard using the live demo — the same software that serves real devices in the Adirondacks today.

Graph Time-series analysis of any counter, trailhead, or whole wilderness area.

Map The park in one view: state-land areas, trailheads, DEC trails, and a usage heat layer.

Admin Curate trailheads and areas, manage counters and dashboard users.

TrailCount map view of the Adirondack Park — The map view on sign-in: Adirondack state lands colored by classification, ready to explore.

Use the contents on the left, the arrows below, or your keyboard’s ← → keys to page through.

Getting in

Sign in and land on the map

Access is by invitation — an administrator creates your account (more on that in the Admin chapter). Signing in drops you straight onto the map, framed to the whole park, with your filter selections remembered per session as you move between views.

TrailCount sign-in page — The sign-in page. Administrators provision accounts; there is no self-service signup.

Shared controls

One filter panel, every view

The left panel reads identically on the Graph and Map: a date range, the wilderness Areas you care about, and the individual Counters within them. Below the divider live the view-specific controls — grouping and combining on the Graph, the usage heat controls on the Map.

Dates default to the trailing 52 weeks, ending yesterday (today’s data hasn’t uploaded yet).
Areas is a multi-select — pick several to compare them side by side.
Counters auto-fills with the selected areas’ counters; prune or search to focus.
The footer shows the exact build you’re running — handy when confirming a fresh deploy.

Spatial context

The park, its lands, and its trailheads

The map layers the things stewards actually reason about: official state-land unit boundaries (from the Adirondack Park Agency’s land classification, simplified so shared borders stay coincident), DEC trail lines colored by blaze, and trailhead markers colored by recent traffic. Selecting an area outlines it with a glow, frames the view, and reveals its trails and trailheads.

High Peaks Wilderness selected on the map — High Peaks Wilderness selected: boundary glow, DEC trails by blaze color, trailheads colored by 30-day traffic.

Ten switchable basemaps (Esri topo by default) — terrain, satellite, USGS, and more.
Select multiple areas and the view frames all of them together.
Click any trailhead for its details — and a one-click jump to its graph.

Where the impact is

Heat that follows the trail

Most heat maps draw circles around points. TrailCount’s usage layer follows the actual trail network: each trailhead’s glow walks its DEC trails into the backcountry, fading with distance the way real visitation does. A busy flagship trailhead runs wide, deep, and red; a quiet one is a thin yellow thread that ends at the first bend.

Usage heat corridors on the map — Corridor heat: width, reach, and color all scale with each trailhead’s traffic.

Width and Reach set the busiest trailhead’s footprint; everything else scales beneath it.
Curation is live — reject a trailhead or fix its trails and the heat updates instantly.

The numbers

From one counter to a whole wilderness

The Graph plots hiker counts over any date range, grouped by hour up to year. Select a whole area and it stays readable: the five busiest counters get their own lines and everything else folds into a single “All others” series — with the busy lines painting first while the long tail loads.

Graph view for a wilderness area — An area’s year at a glance: top five counters plus the combined rest, weekly buckets.

Pick individual counters for exact comparisons, or check Combine trails for one total line.
Grouping adapts to your range — from hourly detail to multi-year trends.

Side by side

One line per area

Select several areas and the graph answers the managerial question directly: which area carries more use, and when? Each area’s counters sum into a single named line — High Peaks against Vanderwhacker, wilderness against wild forest, season against season.

Comparing two areas on the graph — Two areas compared over a year — one summed line each.

Stewardship operations

Curate the catalog, manage the fleet

Admin is where the system stays true to the ground: confirm or reject derived trailheads, edit the trails each one serves (picked from the official DEC trail names, so map linkage never breaks on a typo), maintain areas, and watch counter health — battery, firmware, and last call-in for every device.

Admin trailheads table — The trailhead catalog: search, filter by review status, edit in place.

The Users tab manages dashboard access itself: create accounts, and mark who is an administrator. Only admins see this page — everyone else gets the Graph and Map, read-only.

Admin users tab — User management: provision accounts and grant or revoke admin in one click.

Share exactly what you see

Every view has an address

Areas and trailheads are linkable, so a finding can be handed to a colleague as a URL. The map and graph link into each other, too — click a trailhead’s pin and jump straight to its numbers.

/map?area=High Peaks Wilderness — the map, framed to an area with its trails and trailheads shown.
/map?trailhead=<id> — fly directly to one trailhead’s pin.
/dashboard?area=High Peaks Wilderness — the graph, preloaded with an area’s counters.
/dashboard?trail=<id> — one counter’s series, ready to read.

That’s the tour. Open the live demo and try it with a year of realistic data — or get in touch to talk about counting your trails.