About
About It’s a Trail Day
It’s a Trail Day answers one question for every trail we cover across Maryland, Virginia, DC, Delaware, and West Virginia: is today a trail day, and for what?
We do it by pulling live data from authoritative public sources — the National Weather Service for forecasts, precipitation, and alerts; the National Park Service alerts feed for federal-unit closures; AirNow for air quality; and (where available) state DNR/DCR feeds for state-park advisories — and combining them into a single 0–100 trail-day score per activity per trail. Every trail gets its own page with a full conditions dashboard, the day’s best activity, mud-score, and any active closures.
What we aren’t
We aren’t a route-finder, a review platform, or a social network. We don’t do GPS turn-by-turn, user-submitted photos, or trip reports. Those problems are solved well elsewhere. We do conditions, closures, and an honest daily ranking — and the only thing that determines where a trail shows up in that ranking is the live data.
Editorial integrity
Local outfitters, bike shops, shuttle services, guide services, and trail-town lodges can list their businesses with us. Those listings appear in clearly-labeled sections on relevant trail and park pages. They never reorder our scoring, rankings, or “best today” lists. The whole reason this site exists is that the alternatives sold their integrity to ads and affiliate links; we won’t.
How it’s built
Statically generated with Astro, hosted on Cloudflare Pages, rebuilt and redeployed on each push. Every data source is a public API. We don’t set cookies, we don’t run analytics SDKs, we don’t have user accounts. There is no newsletter popup. The full methodology of the scoring algorithm is on the Methodology page; every external source we query is on the Data sources page. This site is maintained by 137 & Co..
Coverage
We currently cover 38 curated trails across 16 parks in 5 states / DC, scored against 4 activity profiles (hiking, trail running, mountain biking, dog walking). That spans Shenandoah, the C&O Canal, the Appalachian Trail in Maryland, Patapsco and Gunpowder, Rock Creek, Great Falls on both sides of the Potomac, Harpers Ferry, Catoctin and Cunningham Falls, Sugarloaf, Prince William Forest, Assateague, White Clay Creek, Rocky Gap, and Dans Mountain.
We add trails as we verify them against agency sources. Suggestions welcome at hello@itsatrailday.com.
For business owners
Run an outfitter, bike shop, shuttle service, guide service, or trail-town lodge near one of these trails? See our For Businesses page for listing options.
Contact
Something wrong on a trail page? Know a trail we should add? Want to list a business? Email hello@itsatrailday.com.