Map Your Ride

A shout-out to our friends at Bicycling.com, which won a coveted MPA Digital Award this week for its Wireless Rides tool. The tool enables users to submit GPS tracks and descriptions of their favorite road and mountain bike rides, then view and share interactive maps of the route. (Click here to view a sample 15-miler in the Sierra foothills outside San Jose.) Launched last summer, the site currently has more than 200 fact-checked rides all across the country.

We’d be negligent—and not very good at self-promotion!—if we didn’t also say that BICYCLING’S mapping tool is a version of the GPS-enabled hikes functionality introduced several years ago at Backpacker.com (which, incidentally, won a MPA award for it last spring). And here’s the really cool part: Our map editor, Kris Wagner, and the rest of BACKPACKER’s map team are the brains behind both operations; they manage more than a hundred regular contributors, fact-check every ride and hike, and make sure the maps, photos, and videos are in the right place. Interested in becoming an official BICYCLING or BACKPACKER map contributor? Email our map editor to see what it takes. —Jon Dorn