This is a guest post by Craig Calvert, creator of Can I Ride (caniride.app).
A couple of winters ago I loaded up my mountain bike and drove to the newly opened trail system near where I live. It had been sunny for a couple of days, so I figured the wetness from rain and cold temps the previous week had dried out. I pulled in to find the trails closed — too wet to ride due to the freezing and thawing cycles the previous week. That got me thinking. It would be great to know the conditions of the trails before I loaded up all my gear and drove out to the trails. I figured others would like to know that too. So I created caniride.app.
Here in the Southeast, “is it too muddy to ride?” isn’t really about whether you’ll have fun. It’s about whether you’ll do damage. It’s intuitive that the trails will be wet during and immediately after it rains. But how can you tell when they’ll dry out? Then there are times in the winter when it seems like everything is dry, but the average person doesn’t know the impact of moisture that has frozen, thawed, and frozen again overnight. These conditions leave the trails wet and vulnerable to damage for longer periods of time.
What it does
Can I Ride forecasts trail conditions for around 150,000 trails across the continental US. Instead of an open/closed flag that someone has to flip by hand, it predicts the things that actually decide whether dirt is rideable: how much rain landed on that patch of ground, how long it will take to dry, whether the soil went through an overnight freeze-thaw cycle, and what the surface is likely to do over the next 48 hours.
Under the hood it’s a geospatial problem I enjoyed working on. I pull from multiple NOAA forecasts and MRMS radar-derived precipitation, then boil it down to a plain-language read for each trail: a mud risk score, an estimated drying time, and a short-term surface forecast. Most of the work is getting weather and hydrology data down to the resolution of a single trailhead and keeping it fresh by the hour.
For riders: ride planning
For riders, it’s a ride-planning tool. Instead of guessing and refreshing a radar app, you can check the predicted trail status before you commit to the drive. It matches how people already search: “[trail name] trail conditions,” “MTB trail conditions near me,” or “can I ride today?” The goal is to answer that honestly, even when the honest answer is “give it another day.”
For trail managers: stewardship
The other half is for the people who maintain the dirt. For trail managers and volunteer stewards, Can I Ride is meant to be one more signal, not a verdict. The decision to open or close a trail belongs to the local club or land manager who knows that ground better than any model will. But a lot of those calls get made on gut feel and a glance at the rain gauge, often by one tired volunteer on a Sunday night. If a drying-time estimate and a mud risk score take some of the guesswork out of that decision, and help riders understand why a trail is closed, that’s a small win for trail stewardship and for the dirt itself.
That’s the loop I care about. Riders riding when it’s good, staying home when it’s not, and trail crews needing fewer trips to the trails to make decisions on closing and spending fewer weekends repairing avoidable ruts.
Where the app stands now
The web app is changing every day as I continue to develop it. I enjoy hearing from riders and trail organizations about whether the forecasts match what they see on the ground. The app will continue to grow according to what users need and want.
If you ride, or you help look after trails, I hope this will be a useful tool for you. If you use it and the app gets it wrong, let me know at caniride.app/contact.
