Discover and explore Colorado’s unique trail experiences with the Colorado Trail Explorer. Available for free, COTREX offers the most comprehensive trail map available for the state and is built atop data from over 230 trail managers.
View trails by allowed uses on the map, browse featured routes, download offline maps, record trips and notes in the field, complete challenges to earn badges, and share your experiences with the community. COTREX is your gateway into Colorado’s magnificent outdoors.
■ DISCOVER TRAILS & FEATURED ROUTES
– Browse or search to find trails and Feature Routes that match your activities or interests.
– Change activity type to dynamically filter trails on the map.
■ OFFLINE MAPS
– No cell coverage? No problem! Download maps ahead of time for a continuous experience that doesn’t depend on your network.
– COTREX offline maps are lightweight in size and easy to download.
■ RECORD TRIPS & FIELD NOTES
– Capture the details of your outdoor experiences by recording Trips.
– Go beyond simple photos by taking and classifying rich Field Notes along the way. Choose from 45,000+ classifications that include trail conditions, species, rocks and minerals, historic places, points of interest, and much more.
– Seamlessly sync activity recorded on your devices with the web.
■ COMPLETE CHALLENGES TO EARN BADGES
– By recording and classifying Field Notes, you can complete Challenges and earn Badges for your profile.
■ SHARE WITH THE COMMUNITY
– Inform and inspire the entire COTREX community by sharing your Trips and Field Notes publicly or submitting Trip Reports.
– View activity feeds for all users or just the ones you follow.
– By sharing your experiences, you also help to inform trail managers about current conditions on the ground.
■ ABOUT COTREX
The Colorado Trail Explorer endeavors to map every trail in the state of Colorado in support of the Colorado the Beautiful Initiative. COTREX connects people, trails, and technology by coordinating the efforts of federal, state, county, and local agencies to create a comprehensive repository of recreational trails for public use.
This project is led by Colorado Parks and Wildlife (CPW) and Department of Natural Resources, but is only made possible through partnerships with organizations at every level statewide. COTREX represents a seamless network of trails managed by over 230 land managers.
■ DISCLAIMERS
[Battery Life] We do everything we can to make the app low power when recording, but GPS is notorious for reducing battery life
This is been a great app. It save me a few times when I was heading the wrong direction of a trail. Haven’t had any problems.
Would love it. If it was, apple watch compatible just got one and this map definitely needs to be on the Apple watch, especially out dirt biking. It would be amazing to be able to just look down at my wrist instead of having to pull out my phone or use the phone mount. Also would be really cool if you could sync up the group of people you’re riding with so you could see each other on the map. I understand that might require everybody to have cell phone service but could potentially be really cool feature specially if somehow you could have an off-line feature but could see where your friends are !
Slick interface, but lacking in up to date info
This app is being promoted as a better solution than crowd-sourced options but it really isn’t. Popular hikes have no information and some shows trails starting from closed/private land trailheads that are likely to get your car towed or at least ticketed. So it is not more accurate than crowd sourced, and it has less information. Only a few “featured hikes” have detailed information and photos. I have not actually found a user trip report yet, so it does not appear that they are getting much help, and they don’t even have all the state parks as featured. So meh.
Love this app
I use it all the time when hiking, makes way finding trails with multiple intersections. Used it a lot when off-roading as well since you can download the map for offline use. Very handy and a must have for any Coloradian. Can’t seem to get my password reset though…
Ok but mileage tracking seems off
App is okay but Trail recording distance seems off. Distance reported by this app is more than reported in AllTrails and the Apple Watch activity tracking which match with each other in comparison.
Wish every state had one!
I love this thing. So, so much better than having to use multiple forest service maps, BLM, etc. to find and plan a great hike. Also adore how it shows trail systems operated by smaller agencies — counties, towns, state parks, etc. — that you would miss by consulting only the federal agency maps. It’s a real breakthrough to have all of these things in one place.
It makes me sad when I am traveling outside Colorado and have to fall back on Alltrails. Ugh. The maps on Alltrails are OK but since it’s all crowdsourced and the underlying maps arent as good or inclusive, it really constricts your options. I am outside the state a lot so I’m looking into Gaia GPS, but really I’d love it if all states copied COTREX.
Another thing that’s great about COTREX: it works on my crappy poor-person phone (2020 iphone SE). I love you COTREX! Never change!
Ok but mileage tracking seems off
App is okay but Trail recording distance seems off. Distance reported by this app is more than reported in AllTrails and the Apple Watch activity tracking which match with each other in comparison.
Why did elevation gain get removed?
I used to be able to use the measure tool to make a route and get the distance and elevation gain. It shows the elevation profile but not the elevation gain. I bet more people care about total elevation gain over elevation profile. Please bring back elevation gain in the measure tool.
Incredibly useful hiking/exploring app
I love this app and wouldn’t be able to go on my many mountain adventures without it! My only gripes are some UX/UI things. In particular I’d like to be able to copy latitude and longitude from places selected on the map. Sometimes there are coordinates, sometimes not! I can’t tell why some things have them and some don’t. The other issue is when there are coordinates, copying them gives me the coordinates plus a url. What is the use case for wanting both? I want one or the other, I don’t want to have to paste a long url into my other maps app and delete it all to get to the coordinates. There is already a separate share button for the link itself, so why concatenate the two?
Great App for Outdoor CO Activities
Impressive app from the state of CO. It’s been my go to for Off-roaming, Mtn biking, and hiking. Highly recommend
Great trail map for Colorado
This id a wonderful, free app. Always use it on Colorado trails. Even with no cell service it works great.
I just wish it would work in landscape mode, too, on my phone.
