Forty miles of trail, in your hand.

The situation

The Razorback Greenway is one of the unsung civic accomplishments of Northwest Arkansas — a 40-mile, six-city, mixed-use trail you can ride from Bentonville to Fayetteville without seriously touching pavement traffic. The Razorback Greenway Alliance is the small organization that keeps it stitched together, and they wanted a map online that actually did the trail justice.

Not a static PDF. Not a Google My Maps export. A real product: where to park, where to start, where to eat, where to stop, where to fix a flat — everything a first-time rider needs, on a phone, mid-ride, without a manual.

What I built

I built it solo on a Lofty Labs engagement. The application is a Vue.js single-page app on top of a Mapbox GL canvas, backed by a Django + PostGIS API and a Wagtail-driven CMS the Alliance staff edit themselves — so amenities, points of interest, trail closures, and seasonal updates stay current without anyone calling a developer.

The hard part wasn't the data; it was the cartography. Forty miles is a lot of trail. On a phone screen, it's a lot of trail to fit in legibly without flattening it into a useless line. The work was iterating on tile styles, label density, marker hierarchy, and zoom-dependent rendering until a rider standing at a trailhead in Springdale could understand, in one glance, where they were and what was around them.

What changed

The map is live and in active use by riders, walkers, and the Alliance itself. The Alliance now has a tool they can keep current themselves — trail closures, new amenities, route changes — and a piece of civic infrastructure that visibly improves how the Greenway gets used.