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

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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 purports to help you find hiking trails near you. With a Connect+ subscription, you can even sync courses for those trails to your map-enabled watch.

It sounds pretty great. Unfortunately, its selection of trails is pretty disappointing at launch—it doesn't even suggest I try out my own favorite trails.

How to access Garmin Trails

You don’t need a Connect+ subscription to search for trails, filter for features, and look at the routes and reviews of trail—all of that comes free with the regular Connect app, whether on your phone or through the Connect Web interface. If you have a Garmin device, you already have a login for these services. 

To find it Garmin Trails from within Connect, tap the More menu in the app, find and tap Training and Planning, and then scroll to Garmin Trails. You'll be given a map of suggested trails. Zoom the map and tap on 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 the name of a trail near me in Pennsylvania, I see results from Maine and Maryland before the Pennsylvania ones.

There’s also a filter icon, which you can use to limit your results by distance from your current location, the amount of ascent in the trail, as well as rating, difficulty, trail type, and features. 

The features you can filter for include: 

• Dog friendly

• No dogs

• Waterfalls

• Lakes

• Rivers

• Oceans

• Mountaineering

• Steep sections

• Forest

• Flowers

• Kid friendly

• Permit required

• Water sources

• Reaches peaks

• Rough road

Only the U.S. and a few European countries are supported right now

At launch, trails are only available in the U.S. and in four European countries: Austria, Germany, Lichtenstein, and Switzerland. “New trails in different regions will be added periodically,” says a Garmin support page.

Garmin’s original announcement didn’t mention this restriction, so much of the chatter I'm seeing about this online involves disappointment from users outside this handful of countries. This writer in the U.K., for example, calls the feature “NoTrails” (referencing competitor AllTrails, get it?) 

In the U.S., I’m definitely seeing some trails, but not enough to make the feature particularly useful. 

I’m just not seeing a lot of trails

I like to run and hike on trails, and I live near a county park that is absolutely riddled with hikeable, runnable, and mountain bike-able trails. There’s a local trail running group that meets six times a week, seemingly always at a different spot (I’m sure they repeat their favorites, but there is plenty of variety on offer). So what does Garmin Trails have in its database for my area?

Here’s Garmin on the left, and the county trails website on the right: 

Garmin, left; Allegheny County website, right. Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Garmin/Allegheny County

Kudos to Garmin for knowing about the Rachel Carson trail, that long one that appears as a black line. It’s 46 miles long and quite well-known in the area. Garmin has it listed as a series of short segments. They are correctly labeled as “hard” difficulty. 

But the entire North Park area has two trails? I’m not even sure how a person would find out about the Orange and Green trails without learning about all the others in the park. Where is the Red trail, with its red-and-blue branch with all the 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 those Orange and Green trails, both are labeled with their correct distance, but they’re also both marked as “easy,” which they are definitely not. I did a trail run last week that included the whole Orange trail and part of the Green. It was about five miles and had 800 feet of elevation gain. That’s not an easy trail at all. 

I asked a Garmin rep where the trail data comes from, and was told Garmin used, “a variety of sources and our in-house cartography team.” As far as I can tell, they aren’t copied from AllTrails or any other source, or at least not directly. (Might be better if they were; AllTrails has the Green trail more reasonably labeled as moderate rather than easy.)

Browsing through other areas I’m familiar with, it seems that the most iconic trails in any spot are in the database, so this tool isn’t useless, just incomplete (hopefully temporarily). A few of the gorge trails I remember most fondly from Ithaca, NY are in there. Yellowstone National Park has plenty of labeled trails. 

I asked fellow Lifehacker writer Daniel Oropeza to look for trails in areas he was familiar with, and he compared the Three Sisters Waterfall area in Garmin and AllTrails. Garmin has one trail to the waterfall, while there are actually four; the wider area has 19 trails in the Garmin database, but 143 in AllTrails. 

Garmin, left; AllTrails, right. Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Garmin, Daniel Oropeza/AllTrails

It’s free to browse trails, but you must pay to send them to your watch

Garmin Trails seems to be a pot-sweetener for the new Connect+ subscription tier. The Trails feature itself is free, but only subscribers to Connect+ (or Maps+, another Garmin offering) can send trail courses from this database to their devices. Compatible devices include anything that supports courses, like most recent Fenix, Forerunner, and Instinct watches (and Edge cycling computers). A watch that supports maps, like the new Forerunner 970, would be a natural pairing with this new feature.

Trails also seems 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 login). Courses can be private or user-created; there’s currently no way for users to create a trail. That means there can be multiple versions of the same trail, and courses that don’t correspond to a specific trail—somebody who ran part of the Orange and part of the Green, let’s say, because that happened to be convenient for them on the day they created that course. 

If more trails get added to Garmin Trails, it could eventually be a useful feature. The trail ratings, comments, and filters are handy to have. But AllTrails already has those features, and you can load AllTrails routes to your Garmin watch if you subscribe to AllTrails Plus, which is $35.99/year—cheaper than Garmin Connect+, which will cost you $6.99/month or $69.99/year.