The year 2013: On Fillarifoorumi Antti Nissinen reports having found a possible solution to a long-discussed idea of sharing the oral tradition about the trails of the Tampere area, so that it would be easier for new mountain bikers in particular to get into the sport. The idea is to map the trails into the OpenStreetMap community map (OSM), which anyone can edit, and to visualise them with a home-made map style so that the trails show on the map in different colours according to their technicality, i.e. their rideability on a mountain bike: from pine-needle trails (green) to the harder-end root-and-rock gymnastics trails (red).

The idea turns out to work, and soon Antti has mobilised a group of mountain bikers to learn to use OSM and, after their rides, to mark the trails missing from it complete with a technicality classification. A small group of the most diligent volunteers systematically maps the trails of different areas: on special mapping rides they explore all of an area's trails in one go, even if the ride itself does not end up being very flowing thanks to all the dead ends and riding back and forth.

A few years later the result is astonishing: thanks to the urban structure of Tampere and the neighbouring municipalities, the area has an exceptionally fine and extensive trail network well suited to mountain biking, which is now almost entirely described in detail in the OSM-based "MTB Kartta" (MTB map). From the fine pine-needle trails of the eskers to technical rough singletrack and everything in between. Anyone, even someone taking up the sport, can get straight into the trail network and head for new trails on every ride. Before the MTB map this was only possible for people who had done the sport for years and had gradually learned the various trails of the area on group rides — and only very few even of that lot knew all the trails of Tampere and the neighbouring municipalities comprehensively.

Let's illustrate this with a couple of map pictures:

The MTB map of the trail mecca of Kauppi in Tampere

And here, for comparison, MML's NLS topographic map

Quite a difference! Not just in the coverage of the trail network but also in how their rideability is described. In the area's orienteering maps the trails are of course easy to find, but even there the rideability does not show, and on top of that, rounding up orienteering maps for different areas is quite laborious, as is using them to navigate during a ride (mountain bike orienteers disagree entirely on this, of course).

The year 2016: Another Fillarifoorumi member, Tapio Kaasalainen, works up a map from the OSM database in the spirit of the MTB map, in a format you can load onto Garmin bike computers and sports watches. This makes navigating on a ride even easier, as the MTB map shows on the Garmin's screen with the trails classified by colour. If you have also drawn a track in GPX format before the ride that you can load onto the Garmin, then navigating on a ride is pretty smooth even on unfamiliar trails.

The Garmin MTB map

The year 2018: yours truly develops, for his own use, the Bikemap app, which has a few new features compared to the MTB map web app that had been in use until then. Bikemap is thus a new interface to the trail data in OSM and to the MTB map style Antti developed. Bikemap's functionality gradually grows, the biggest chunks being track handling, planning your own routes and the "3D MTB" map, which combines the MTB map with hillshading calculated from MML's data and with the excellent and highly interesting MapAnt project's detailed, orienteering-map-like map layer.

3D MTB Map: besides the trails, you can now also think about which trails you want to climb and which to descend

2020: Bikemap's use has grown, and a large group of trail runners has found it too. Yours truly does both sports himself and finds the route planning done before a run, helped by a good trail map, even more valuable for trail running than for his other sport, mountain biking: on a bike it is easier to just head out and pick trails according to how you feel during the ride, and it does not matter so much if an hour's ride turns into a good two hours. The slower-moving trail runner cannot take quite the same liberties, and a little time spent thinking about the route in advance pays itself back as a better run.

And so the thought is born: let's turn Bikemap into Trailmap, whose name lands better with everyone who uses forest trails and is interested in them. Let's put a blog alongside the app with tips for finding new trails and routes, and for navigating them on a ride. That way the enormously valuable volunteer work already done to describe the trails in the OSM database gets into the awareness and daily use of even more enthusiasts.

And, very importantly, based on previous experience some of those who benefit from others' volunteer work pass the favour on and join the volunteer crew themselves, starting to add and classify trails in the OSM database, which improves its quality and value further for everyone. And there you have Trailmap's original mission in all its simplicity: to build, with the combined effort of enthusiasts of the different sports that use the trails, trail maps of the whole of Finland that are as accurate and as easy to use as possible, so that it is easier for enthusiasts to create new routes and find new trails & scenery to liven up their rides and runs.

EDIT (11 Oct 2023): Later this mission broadened to cover moving about in nature more widely and, with gravel riding among other things, the road network — especially forest roads and smaller gravel roads — became part of the mission too.