While guidebooks are great, they aren’t always easy to take with you on every adventure. And what if you are simply heading to a new city for work and want to find some great trail runs frequented by locals? Bivy is your answer.
Bivy is an app and online portal that enables you to find, track, and share all sorts of outdoor adventures. The app highlights 17 different types of adventures from rock climbing and hiking to kayaking and camping — the database already includes tens of thousands of different adventures mapped all across the country.
Every activity is marked from the start of the trip all the way through to the finish so you get more than just directions to the trailhead. You can navigate within the app itself and it will even give you alerts when you start straying off course.
Bivy keeps you connected to family, friends and other users — you can track each other’s location within the app and receive badges and achievements when trails are completed. You can also share comments, accomplishments, and activity ideas with your fellow adventure-seekers — it’s a bit of an adventure social network in that way.
A quick search of Yosemite returns over 96 adventures to be had including one of my favorites — cycling across Yosemite on Tioga Road — as well as a few adventures I now need to add to my list like riding Sonora Pass and snowshoeing the Dewey Point Winter Loop. All the adventures are color coded according to activity, ranked by difficulty, and feature all sorts of details including star ratings from fellow Bivy users who have completed the trips in the past.
I have chatted at length with Bivy founder, Vance Cook, and he has a lot of fun things planned for the app. He and his team have spent the past few years painstakingly tracking and uploading adventures so you know they are legit. Plus, as the community grows, more and more adventures will be tracked and uploaded. Right now you can sign up for the app for free so head on over and check it out.