Consistently rated and communicated trails for more fun and safety, globally and locally.
That’s the vision that we are striving for with the ITRS.
Towards the end of 2022, the year where we first published the ITRS, it became clear to us that a PDF document and a website would not be sufficient to achieve our vision.
Why? Because achieving consistent ratings by different people all over the world seems even a bigger challenge than the definition of a trail rating system itself. And imagine collecting all the rating data prescribed by the ITRS that is required for an objective trail rating for a myriad of trails with pen and paper.
What’s better than an app to help out with that job?
We are not a software company, and our financial resources were limited, but we had our vision and the resources of the 3 people that constitute this “We” Edoardo Melchiori and Mischa Crumbach who developed the ITRS, and his partner in life and business at Trail Therapy GmbH, Christa Deiwiks, who was masochistic enough to jump head first into the unknown: the development of her first mobile app.
15 months later, after many lines of code and several episodes of despair over bugs quickly alternating with exuberant joy over bug fixes (and back again), in early April, the first beta version of the ITRS Trail Rating App was successfully used by the participants of our first CTR (Certified Trail Rater) education. We were able to show that the concept works – the app as the core of this education enabled consistent, objective, and standardised trail evaluations by different users with mostly very little experience in trail rating. To cite participant Christopher Riis, who rated all official bike trails in Denmark over the past 7 years and is very likely the most experienced trail rater to date:
“With the ITRS app and after only two days of training the other participants achieved the same level of trail rating confidence that took me 2-3 years to develop.”
Christopher Riis – DGI Denmark & OnTrail Manager
And for Mark McClure, who took part in the first CTR training, too, and who is tutor of the DIRTT project, highly experienced trail builder and trail builder educator:
“The ITRS and the ITRS app are at the core of our industry.”
Mark McClure – Trail Builder & DIRTT Tutor
The beta version of the app is only available to CTRs for further testing, but also for first professional applications in destinations implementing the ITRS.
In the next phase, the app will be developed into a rock-solid product that covers all the use cases we currently have in mind. We will now work with specialised partners to bring in all the experience needed for such a project.
More exciting times ahead of us!
