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Mountain biking workflow

Former Member
Former Member over 5 years ago

Hi all,

This is my first Garmin since my ol' Edge 500 so please bear with me. A lot has changed! My biggest confusion at the moment is how to setup a mountain workflow. Ideally, i'd like to show up at a trail head and through combination of my phone and Edge 530 figure out a route and ride it. Is this possible? Less ideally, i could plan things out ahead of time on my desktop and transfer what's required using TrailForks.

It seems that "TrailForks" is both baked into the device and also available as a Connect IQ app? How does this work? Which should i use? Which does what?

Today i went to a trail head, turned on the Edge, selected Mountain profile, went to Navigation, then MTB Trail Navigation. I searched for trails near me but only a list with cryptic names like "Route 1, Route 2, Route 2" etc showed up. Many were a very short distance. I selected a 7 miles Search filter, but it looks like that is the maximum distance and there's no way to filter out the short trails. Basically i found this to be useless and gave up and rode with out the Garmin.

Doing some research now, i see that i need to use ConnectIQ to "download" a wishlisted route from the TrailForks website. Then then puts it in my Garmin Courses list. I haven't tried it, but this seems reasonable assuming i remember to find a wishlist trails ahead of time on a desktop computer.

If i should use ConnectIQ TrailForks, what is the purpose of the "MTB Trail Navigation" feature?

Id rather not have my phone with me. What options are available without it? What can be done on the phone vs desktop vs just the Garmin?

Lastly and most importantly, how do you guys use this for mountain biking? How should this work?

Thanks a lot

  • Former Member
    0 Former Member over 5 years ago

    Here's an additional question. I have several routes saved in "My Routes" in Trail Forks. They sync nicely to the Garmin and I can see them in ConnectIQ -> Trailforks -> My routes. Here i can select a route and download it and/or i can launch it. What's the difference between launching a route in the TrailForks ConnectIQ app vs launching the downloaded route directly from the Garmin's Navigation -> Courses?

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to Former Member

    Nothing. It's just a different interface to load the same course.

  • 0 over 5 years ago in reply to ZillaG

    Also, the device seemingly has NOT been useful for MTB navigation.