Platr Tracks · iOS · Turkey Bay OHV · McCracken County farm paths

Navigate off-road with terrain that knows the difference.

Trail maps tell you where trails are designated. Tracks tells you which route home avoids the creek crossing that floods after half an inch of rain — based on the terrain tensor, not the trailhead kiosk.

The canonical launch area is Turkey Bay OHV — the only USFS-designated off-highway vehicle area in Kentucky, about 2,300 acres of federally-managed forest in the Land Between the Lakes threaded with ATV trails, gravel roads, and old logging tracks. The team rides here. Tracks is dogfooded from day one.

The second AOI is McCracken County farm paths — the network of county roads, private drives, and field-edge tracks that connects rural parcels in the Jackson Purchase. Farm navigation doesn’t have a published trail map. It has terrain and property boundaries.

Routes that know what’s actually rideable

Trail maps and OSM tracks tell you where the routes are. They don’t tell you whether a specific route is rideable on a specific day — slope, tree clearance, and water crossings all change the answer.

What Tracks adds: a routing layer that combines slope (from 2-foot terrain), tree clearance (from canopy height), and water-crossing risk (from streams + flood exposure at the crossing points). The router picks the best route based on conditions, not just the line on the map. The result is a path that reflects actual passability, not just geometry.

The expected finding when the trail graph is delivered: unmarked connections between named Turkey Bay OHV trails via old logging roads and farm paths not on any published map. Tracks will tell you which of those connections are rideable and which are marginal — based on actual terrain rather than trail-designation paperwork.

What Tracks knows about your route

Terrain

2-foot ground elevation across Turkey Bay and McCracken County. Used to compute trail grade per segment.

Land character

Slope and lay of the land for every cell of the McCracken pipeline. The slope component drives routing.

Tree clearance

Canopy height at 60-cm resolution. Cells above three meters read as tree canopy — relevant for clearance on enclosed trails.

Streams + crossings

Stream network locations along any trail, combined with terrain-based flood exposure at the crossing points. Identifies which crossings flood at a given storm threshold.

Official trail map

USFS Motor Vehicle Use Map for Turkey Bay — the designated trail network by vehicle class (OHV, street-legal, pedestrian only).

Community tracks

OpenStreetMap tracks for Turkey Bay and McCracken — the source for unmarked connections the official map doesn’t capture.

Live Activity on Lock Screen

Start a trip and the Dynamic Island shows trail name, elapsed distance, and next water crossing — without the phone leaving your pocket. The Lock Screen widget shows the same. This is the primary interaction model for an active ride: the phone stays away, the data stays visible.

At trip end, the breadcrumb track is saved in SwiftData and replayable — every GPS point with timestamp, elevation from the DEM, and any crossings flagged during the ride.

Status

Tracks is pipeline-gated — it waits on the trail-network graph (every junction and segment, weighted by the routing layer above). The terrain data is in place; the graph itself is the remaining work before iOS development starts. Turkey Bay terrain bake assets from an earlier pipeline run can produce a preview map before the app ships.

See also: the Turkey Bay terrain demo — hillshade, trail network, and tap-to-rain gravity mode, produced from the same LiDAR data that Tracks will use for routing.

Interested in off-road routing for your area? Fork Development Corp — info@jays.bio

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