If we're off-roading, we're using Trails Offroad.
It doesn't matter whether we know the area or arrive the night before with no plan. When we get to a new place, the first tool we use is Trails Offroad. We pull up Trails Offroad to see which trails are nearby and find out where the good dirt is. After years of jeeping across America and Canada, it's become our number one asset.
This isn't a formal review. We're telling you how we actually use Trails Offroad. The night-before planning sessions, the mid-trail GPS saves, and the moments it turned a "we have no idea what's around here" afternoon into one of our best trail days ever.
Table of Contents
First, What Is Trails Offroad?
If you're brand new to it, Trails Offroad is an off-road trail mapping and navigation platform built for overlanders, 4x4 enthusiasts, and anyone who'd rather be on dirt than pavement. What makes it different is that Trails Offroad has crew members who physically hit the dirt to map every trail. This isn't crowdsourced guesswork or downloaded map layers—real people drive and document every trail.
Every trail comes with color-coded difficulty tracks so you can quickly size up what you're getting into. I love the green trails, and Tony loves the orange ones! All-Access members get a numerical technical rating, vehicle recommendations, a written rating summary, and a list of concerns. There are also author-filmed trail videos so you can see exactly what you're heading into. Waypoints mark obstacles, points of interest, and camping spots, each with photos, descriptions, and camping regulations. Community reviews add real-time condition updates and photos from members who've been out recently.
It runs on desktop, mobile, and tablet with automatic cross-device sync. We can build custom routes with snap routing, record off-grid travels with breadcrumb tracking, and download entire states of trail data for offline use. Which, let's be honest, is exactly where all the good trails are anyway.
How We Use It Before, During, and After the Trail
The Night Before: Scouting from the Rig
We learn about new trails from Trails Offroad emails, tips from Jeep people at camp, or by scrolling the map and pinning trails to visit. Often, discovering a route on Trails Offroad determines our travel destination.
We also map trails for Trails Offroad, so when we're rolling into a new region, we're always keeping an eye out for roads worth documenting. It's a great reason to explore the back roads, even when we're not officially "on a trail day."
Planning happens the night before. Dinner is done, and we're at the table with the laptop open. If we haven’t downloaded the trail for offline use, we do that first because cell service is unreliable where the best trails are. We use Trails Offroad’s new routing feature because it’s great to keep everything in one place.
From there, we dig into the trail guide. We're reviewing the technical rating and vehicle recommendation to ensure it's right for our rig. We have a lightly modified Jeep Wrangler, so we're not looking for anything that requires serious rock-crawling modifications. We scroll the waypoints to see what's along the route, obstacles, points of interest, camping spots, and check the photos so we're not walking in blind. We look at trail length and what the route actually involves, because an eight-mile trail in flat desert and an eight-mile trail on shelf roads at elevation are two completely different days. How much water we bring, whether we're packing lunch, whether the kids need extra layers, and whether we're bringing the camp kitchen to make a full day of it depend on the bullets we find in the trail guide.
We also look for connecting trails. Some of our best days come from linking two or three routes in one adventure, and mapping everything within the app makes it easy to plan and execute.
On the Trail: Navigation When It Matters
This is where Trails Offroad really earns its keep. Once we're moving, we connect it to CarPlay. The trail is right there on the screen. Waypoints pop up as you approach. You always know exactly where you are relative to the route. No fumbling with a phone mount. No second-guessing forks in the road. It just works.
Waypoints show obstacles, points of interest, and turns as you approach, so you won’t miss highlights. Sometimes we discover overlooked spurs or offshoots thanks to a flagged waypoint—some of these surprises have become highlights of our trips.
On Big Eye Mine in Kofa National Wildlife Refuge, for example, the desert doesn't give you a lot of landmarks to work with. Having the route loaded and the waypoints marking the turn toward the mine made the whole thing stress-free. We could focus on the scenery instead of trying to navigate by guesswork.
Beyond navigation, we document the trip with photos and videos, and note potential camping spots for ourselves and future trips. Trails Offroad lets us save waypoints, ensuring nothing is lost before we return to camp.
After the Ride: Logging and Adding to the Community
After a good trail day, we leave a review. It takes five minutes, and it's the easiest way to give back to the community that's helped us find so many great routes.
We add photos, note anything that's changed since the last review, and share tips that would have helped us when planning. We report new conditions, tricky spots, viewpoints, or a good camping area. If we mapped a trail for Trails Offroad, we submit that work too.
The whole platform runs on people doing exactly this. The reviews and photos that made us feel confident heading into a trail? Someone took the time to add those after their own adventure. We just try to pay it forward.
What Makes It Stand Out (And Why We've Tried Others)
We've used other trip planning tools like AllTrails, OnX Offroad, iOverlander, and paper maps in data-sparse areas. Each has strengths, but Trails Offroad fits our needs better than others.
The community is genuinely off-road focused. The trail ratings make sense for 4x4 use rather than hiking. The GPS tracks are specific and accurate. The photo quality is usually solid. And the coverage in the Southwest, which is where we spend a huge chunk of our year, is excellent.
It also integrates the Jeep Badge of Honor trails directly into the platform. If you're working toward earning Jeep Badge of Honor badges, you can find those trails right in Trails Offroad, which makes the whole process much smoother. We completed Black Gap Road at Big Bend National Park as a Badge of Honor trail and used Trails Offroad for that planning.
Trails We've Planned and Driven Using Trails Offroad
We've used Trails Offroad across more states and trail types than we can count at this point, but here are some of the areas where it's been especially valuable for us:
Arizona
Arizona is our off-road backyard, and it's also where we've done a lot of our trail mapping for Trails Offroad. Woodchute Trail, Allen Spring - Mingus Mountain, Copper Chief, Laguna Ridge, Granada Wash, and Woodcutters Pass are all trails we put on the map ourselves.
Coconino National Forest is a great example of how deep the trail network out here goes. It's one of those areas where you could spend an entire season and still not hit everything. Trails Offroad makes it actually manageable to figure out what's worth your time and what current conditions look like. Arizona has some amazing riding if you know where to look.
Colorado
If you're searching for offroad trails in Colorado, you already know the trail network out here is massive, and conditions can flip fast. Snow in July at elevation is a real thing. That's exactly why Trails Offroad gets such a workout every time we're in the state.
We've done a lot of exploring and mapping here. Dry Canyon, Kezar Loop Road, Rainbow Lake Road, and Trail Canyon are trails we submitted to Trails Offroad, and the routes are now available for other 4x4 enthusiasts to find and follow.
For planning, Trails Offroad has been invaluable on bigger runs like Cinnamon Pass and Engineer Pass on the Alpine Loop. Both are trails where it's important to know what other drivers experienced recently before heading up. Community reviews on Trails Offroad gave us confidence to go. We also covered San Juan County Road 2 and used the app to navigate around Lake City, which has more trail options than most realize.
Around Gunnison and Crested Butte, it helped us quickly sort out which roads were actually passable for our rig. That kind of filtering saves time and prevents awkward turnarounds on narrow mountain roads.
Michigan
If you're looking for offroad trails in Michigan, you're going to be pleasantly surprised. The trail network in the northern Lower Peninsula and Upper Peninsula is underrated, and we spent a lot of time up there both wheeling and mapping.
Center Firelane Trail, East Center Firelane Trail, East Fire Lane Trail, Sterling Truck Trail, Keeley Road, Pine River Road, Tin Cup Springs, Valley Road, FR 2123, FR 4103, FR 4119, FR 4128. If you're looking for offroad trails in Michigan on the platform, there's a good chance you'll find something with our name on it.
We covered a lot of this when we wrote about Michigan's best-kept secrets and the Upper Peninsula — both great starting points if you're planning a trip up that way and want to know what else is worth your time beyond the trails.
British Columbia, Canada
Blaeberry Road and Redburn Creek Road are both trails we mapped. We were out there exploring roads with very limited local knowledge, documenting them as we went, and now those tracks are available to anyone else heading into that part of BC. However, Trails Offroad has over 34 trails in British Columbia.
Cross-border coverage isn't always a given with off-road tools, so it was genuinely exciting to see Trails Offroad working just as well up there as it does in the Southwest. If you're planning a trip through the Canadian Rockies and looking for dirt roads worth exploring, those two are a great place to start — and you can find them on Trails Offroad now because we went out and found them first.
Tips for Getting the Most Out of Trails Offroad
After years of using Trails Offroad across America and Canada, here's what we've learned about getting the most out of it:
Download before you lose signal. This is non-negotiable. Grab the GPS track the night before while you have WiFi or data. Don't count on being able to pull it up mid-trail, because where the good trails are, you won't have service anyway.
Check the date on reviews. A trail that was in great shape six months ago could be a completely different situation after a wet winter, monsoon season, or heavy snowpack. We always filter for recent activity when evaluating conditions, especially on offroad trails in Colorado, where elevation makes everything more unpredictable.
Use the photos as a reality check. Trail ratings are helpful, but photos of actual terrain tell you more than any numeric difficulty score. We always scroll through before committing to a trail, especially anything rated moderate or harder. A picture of that "moderate" rocky section will tell you way more than the number ever will.
Connect it to CarPlay. If you haven't done this yet, do it. Having the trail and waypoints on your dash screen while you're driving makes a huge difference, letting you keep your eyes on the road while still knowing exactly where you are and what's coming up next.
Use it alongside your other tools. Trails Offroad handles the off-road-specific piece, but we're also checking the weather, RV road conditions, and campground availability. It fits into our broader RV trip planning workflow without replacing anything. Trails Offroad does its part really well.
Contribute when you can. The platform is only as good as the people using it. If you have notes on updated conditions, better photos, or new points of interest, you should add them. We've mapped lots of trails across the country, specifically because we believe the community is what makes this thing work. Every review helps the next person planning their adventure.
Why It's Always Open in the Rig
We've been full-time on the road for over seven years. In that time, we've tried many apps, tools, and systems. Most of them rotate in and out depending on the season or what we're working on. Trails Offroad has never rotated out.
Part of it is practical because it’s genuinely the best off-road trail tool we've found, and it consistently delivers what we need. But part of it is something harder to quantify. Having Trails Offroad open feels like having the keys to a part of the country that most people drive right past. The dirt roads, the unmarked forks, the viewpoints that aren't in any travel guide. That's the world Trails Offroad lives in, and it's exactly the world we love most.
Tony will tell you that some of the best days we've had in the Jeep started with thirty minutes on Trails Offroad the night before and zero cell service from that point forward. That's not a flaw in the app. That's kind of the whole point.
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Ready to Check It Out?
If you're an off-roader, overlander, or Jeep enthusiast who hasn't tried Trails Offroad yet, just download it and start exploring what's near you. You might be surprised how much is out there.
Whether you're searching for offroad trails for Jeeps near me or planning a multi-day overland trip, Trails Offroad is going to be one of the most valuable tools you try out.
And if you need trail inspiration, we've written up a lot of our Jeep adventures right here on the blog, from Arizona to Colorado's Alpine Loop to Michigan. The trails are out there. Go find them.
Have you used Trails Offroad? We'd love to hear which trails you're loving right now. Send us a voice message. We listen to every single one, and we even add them to the podcast.