Trail conditions: telling the public what's open
Create a condition board, keep it current from the field, and embed it on your website with the widget.
The question you get asked most isn't "how many kilometres do you have?", it's "is it open today?".
Trail conditions answer that one. You build a board listing your trails with their state, you keep it current in one click, at the desk or in the field, and you publish it on your website. Users see the same thing your crew sees, at the same time.
Three states, no more:
| State | What it means |
|---|---|
| Open | Rideable |
| Under construction | Rideable with care, or a crew is on it |
| Closed | Stay off |
That economy is deliberate. A seven-shade scale never gets kept up to date; three states do.
To also say what shape the surface is in (groomed, icy, muddy), each trail can carry a state, picked from a list you define per activity. It has its own article: Trail states.
Where: left navigation bar, under Trails → Trail conditions.
One board per audience, not per network
A condition board is an ordered list of trails, attached to an activity. You can have several per activity, and that's often the right call: a public one for the website, a more detailed internal one for the crew, a seasonal one.
The section shows the boards of the activity chosen in the top bar, like the rest of the app: switch activity up there and the list follows.
The boards of the activity chosen at the top.
- 1A board's state reads without opening it: how many trails are open, under work and closed.
- 2Is the board on your website? The answer is here.
Click a board to open it. The ⋯ menu renames or deletes it.
Updating the conditions
A board opens ready to be updated. Each trail carries its three states side by side: one click and it's published. No button to hunt for at the bottom of the page.
A board, ready to be updated.
- 1One click on a trail's state publishes it right away.
- 2On a folder, the Apply to the whole folder menu changes all its trails at once. When they all match, the menu shows their condition; otherwise, the folder shows how many are open.
- 3Automatic updating, visible and adjustable from here.
- 4The board's tabs: each one tells you where you stand, and a click changes what shows below.
- 5The State column: the surface state, picked from your list, with how long ago it was set.
Under the board's name, three tabs sum up the board and lead to everything else: Conditions (the tab that opens by default, the one for updating), Appearance (optional: the board can stay as it is) and On your website ("Online", or "Not installed yet · Install"). What's done carries a green check; what's left to do is in gold.
An Undo message stays for a few seconds after each change: it's the safety net for a click made too fast.
Closing a folder is the highest-value gesture in the section: close "North sector" entirely after rain, then reopen the two trails that dried out.
The whole board at once: the State ▾ and Condition ▾ headers open a "Whole board" menu. The choice applies to every trail on the board, folders included, after a confirmation that says how many trails will change. It covers the whole board, even when a search filters the list.
The same trail in several boards
If a trail appears in two boards, changing its condition in one changes it in the other too, at the same moment. You don't have to maintain two lists in parallel. That holds from the web and from mobile alike.
The guard on "Open"
If you set a trail back to Open while it still carries in-progress tasks, Sentinel stops you and tells you how many. You get two buttons: Set Open anyway, or Under construction.
It isn't a block, it's a reminder — nine times out of ten, someone forgot a crew was still out there.
Building the board
Adding trails, creating folders, changing the order: all of that happens in the Conditions tab, with the Rearrange button. The list then turns into a draft, with handles and remove buttons. A board you have just created offers right away to add its trails. If you switch tabs without saving, Sentinel asks what to do with your changes.
The board in Rearrange mode.
- 1Nothing is published until you click Save: the public sees the previous version while you work. Cancel rolls back.
- 2The handle reorders — the board's order is what the public will see.
- 3The X removes the trail from the board. It doesn't delete the trail itself.
A few mechanics worth knowing:
Folders are one level deep. A folder holds trails, never another folder. That's a deliberate constraint: a public board three levels deep isn't readable.
The order is yours. Drag the rows, or use Sort to arrange them all at once by difficulty and name. What you see here is exactly what a visitor will see.
An added trail keeps its condition. If it already appears in another board, it arrives carrying the condition it has there, not a default "Open". Its surface state isn't carried over: pick it in the State column of the new board.
In this mode the states are shown but not editable: you build on one side, you update on the other. If you leave the mode with unsaved changes, the app holds you back.
Automatic updating
Each board has a setting, shown just above its list: automatic condition updates. It is on by default, and here's precisely what it does.
When a task attached to a trail moves to In progress:
- that trail goes to Under construction in every board where the automation is on;
- unless it is already Closed — a manual closure is never overwritten.
When that task leaves In progress — done, moved to another status, or deleted:
- Sentinel checks whether any other in-progress tasks remain on that trail;
- if none remain, the trail goes back to Open.
In other words, your board keeps itself current during the work, provided the crew moves its tasks to In progress when they start. That's the real reason to do it.
The reminder for forgotten tasks
The opposite risk exists too: the work is done, but nobody set the task to Done. The trail then stays Under construction on your website, wrongly.
To prevent that, Sentinel follows up. When a task stays In progress on a trail that appears on a board:
- 8 hours after it went In progress, a "Task still in progress" reminder goes out;
- then one reminder a day, as long as the task's status hasn't changed.
The reminder goes to the person who started the task and to its assignees (every member, for a group), by notification and by email. It follows their "Update on my tasks" setting in the notification settings. It says which trail shows Under construction and opens the task directly: setting it to Done reopens the trail and stops the reminders.
When to turn it off: when you want the public board to move only by human decision. The setting is per board — you can perfectly well run an automatic internal board and a manual public one.
From the field
On mobile, conditions are one of the view switcher's views, alongside the map and the checklists. The view opens a board of the activity chosen in the app right away.
Tapping the board's name opens the list of every board of the place, grouped by activity. Tap the board you want: if it belongs to another activity, the app's activity changes with it, map included. An activity without a board doesn't appear.
The place band stays on top — it's the same shell as the map. There's no filter row and no filter button on this view though: it doesn't need them.
A condition board on mobile.
- 1The board's name: tap it to switch board, or activity.
- 2The board summary; Whole board changes the access or the state of every trail at once, after a confirmation.
- 3The whole row is tappable. Under the name: the trail's state and how long ago it was set.
- 4A folder header opens the same sheet for the whole folder.
Tap a trail and a sheet slides up with everything you need, without leaving the list:
A trail's sheet.
- 1Access, as three full-width rows that are easy to hit with gloves on. A choice saves it and closes the sheet.
- 2The state, among the activity's states. "None" removes it.
If tasks are in progress on the trail, the sheet reminds you before you set it back to Open. States are picked on mobile but managed on the web, in Trail states: the list stays clean and translated.
As on the web, it's immediate: you pick, it goes, and it is copied to the other boards that include the trail.
One difference, on purpose: you don't build the board from mobile. Adding trails, creating folders, reordering: that's desk work. Mobile is for updating, not for building.
You'll also see a prompt appear when you start a task on a trail tracked by a board: "Do you want to set its condition to Under construction?". It's the manual counterpart of automatic updating.
Publishing on your website
This is the part your users see. The On your website tab tells you whether the board is online or not installed yet, and guides you step by step.
The On your website tab.
- 1Make the board public — while it's off, nobody outside your team can see it.
- 2Pick what your website is built with.
- 3The exact steps for that platform, then the code to paste.
- 4What your visitors will see, live.
One code, pasted in the right place
Pick your platform — WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, SharePoint, AI assistant or Other — and the page tells you exactly where to click, then gives you the code to paste: a single block, where the board should appear. No account, no API key to protect, no code to write.
The language choice fixes the board's language for your visitors, independently of yours.
Not the one managing the site? Send to my webmaster prepares a message to paste into an email, with the code, the fallback and a link to check it.
With an AI assistant
Pick AI assistant: the page gives you a message to paste into Claude, ChatGPT or another assistant. It holds the code and precise instructions: the assistant guides you step by step, or installs the board itself if it has access to your site, then checks that everything works — the board on its own, your site's page, the phone display — and sums it up for you.
If your platform blocks scripts
SharePoint, some intranets and sites with a strict security policy refuse external scripts. For SharePoint, the page gives you an iframe directly — same content, no third-party script to load. For other platforms, it sits under Not working?, along with the two-tag method.
And if the iframe is blocked too, the address inside its src attribute is a full page: it opens as-is in a browser. The See the board on its own in a tab button opens it for you; you can link to it from a menu or send it by email.
What a visitor sees
The widget on a customer's site.
- 1The board's name and the time of the last update.
- 2Each trail's state, with its difficulty symbol.
- 3Under the name, the surface state and how long ago it was set, in the visitor's language. A closed trail shows none.
The widget draws itself with the host site's font, not Sentinel's — it's built to blend in, not to stand out. The Appearance tab gathers the appearance settings with a live preview: you set the width, corner radius, shadow, header and section colours, and decide whether to show the header, the date, and a map of the tracks beside the list.
Three things worth knowing:
The widget refreshes on its own, roughly every minute, without the visitor reloading the page. A trail you close from the field shows as closed on their screen shortly after.
The address carries a token, not your place's identifier. That token grants access to this board and nothing else: not your tasks, not your members, not your other boards.
Turning publishing off cuts access, immediately and everywhere the widget is installed. That's the gesture to know if a board gets published by mistake.
Who can do what
Conditions fall under the Trail conditions right in the place settings.
- With read: on mobile, see the boards and the states, change nothing; the badges stop responding to touch. On the web the section doesn't appear: it requires write.
- With read and write: create boards, build them, change conditions and states, publish the board and customize the widget.
Adding trails to a board (or creating a folder in it) also requires being able to view the place's Trails. Without that right the add buttons don't appear; you can still rearrange, sort and remove.
Changing the list of states (add, rename, delete) also requires write access to Trails: see Trail states.
The right is the same for everything: there's no middle level that would allow changing a condition without being able to publish the widget. If you want field crews updating states, they need write — grant it, knowing they can also touch the widget.
Three pieces of advice
Keep the public board short. The visitor wants to know whether their usual loop is open, not read your 60 segments. Group by sector and only expose what they recognize.
Leave automatic updating on for the board your crew feeds, and get them into the habit of moving tasks to In progress. You get a current board with no extra gesture at all.
Test the embed before handing it to your webmaster. Click See the board on its own in a tab: if the page renders, the token is good and any remaining problem is on the host platform's side, not Sentinel's.
For the work upstream of the board (when to groom, how long to let the snow set, what nordic centers with good grooming reports actually publish), see the guide Trail grooming and grooming reports.