Renner Anderson

Martha and I found this park through AllTrails; no pre-made komoot tour was available. The main entrance on Diffley Road was closed, so we parked across the street on Amberleaf Trail and entered the park by crawling under a gate. Navigating the trail with my komoot app was challenging because it didn't display on the app; we had to rely on a track uploaded from AllTrails. Additionally, the trails were covered in snow and had seen little use since the last snowfall. To make matters worse, komoot frequently lost the GPS signal. Although a work crew had cleared the trails of overgrowth, they left behind loose brush along the path, which constantly snagged our hiking poles. Despite these challenges, we were pleasantly surprised to discover this 60-acre outdoor museum and cultural center in suburban Eagan, which blends art with the natural landscape.

Our daughter, Abbie, invited us to the Hyland Park Reserve Winter Play Day organized by the Three Rivers Park District, where Abbie works in the Natural Resources Section. Our main activity was a ride on an aerial lift to enjoy an arborist’s-eye view of the treetops. An activity perfectly suited for ages eight to eighty! As we joined the festivities with both young and old, I was reminded of the photos of Fun Runs in England that I have seen posted by Adventurer Nic and MLK.

As I looked for our next adventure, a line I recall from my college years, from Steppenwolf's 1967 song "Born to Be Wild," keeps echoing in my mind. "Get your motor runnin' Head out on the highway Looking for adventure In whatever comes our way." "Looking for adventure," I found this hike in the AllTrails app, and then realized it is also a komoot ready-made route. Doyle and Kennefick Regional Park was developed through a partnership between Scott County and the Three Rivers Park District. It officially opened in September 2024, less than two years ago. The Doyles and the Kenneficks were early Irish settler families who homesteaded this land in the late 1880's and whose homestead sites are preserved within the park's boundaries. Local history records note that a member of the Kennefick family was once known as the "poet laureate" of Cedar Lake Township, often composing verses and songs about local characters and events. Because we were exploring this park for the first time, the hike felt like an adventure, and unlike the park trails in our neighborhood, no one had walked these trails since the last snowfall several days prior. On a technical note, the komoot track of this hike experienced GPS signal dropouts; therefore, this track is uploaded from the reliable and accurate Gaia GPS app. This problem is becoming tiresome, but at least it is now predictable.

This morning, Martha and I took a short walk around the deck of our luxury cruise ship, the Goodship Friendship Village. All the world was anew with the fresh fallen snow. Technical note: running all five GPS tracking apps simultaneously and taking care to keep komoot in the most recently used position in the app switcher, komoot still dropped half of this short walk, requiring me to upload this track from my ever-faithful and reliable Gaia GPS app. I'm loving the personal heat maps that were dropped today, but, really, let's take care of the basics first. Accurately tracking one's route is the core function of komoot, before all the new features.

Although we were familiar with Staring Lake Park, having hiked and played disc golf there before, it has become our new go-to nearby hike, replacing the Big Willow and Long Meadow trails we loved before moving from Minnetonka to Bloomington.

Technical notes:. I started out with komoot on the top of the app switcher, and all was well.. But at the southwest corner of the lake, I used my eBird Sound ID app to identify a Pileated Woodpecker.. I believe I forgot to return komoot to the top of the All Switcher, and as a result, komoot lost GPS signals until I got to the far side of the lake.. Shortly after that, I again used another app, I believe my camera, to take pictures of the mallards, and again, I forgot to position Komoot at the top of the app switcher, and again, I suffered GPS signal dropouts.. The story is well illustrated in the komoot track of our hike. Frustrating!. If anyone has an insight into why this is happening, I would be interested to know.l. Right now, Komoot support, which has been very supportive, is stumped. Notes to self on possibly related variables.. I was running 5 tracking apps: Komoot, Gaia, AllTrails, Strava, and eBird.. I was using komoot to navigate, not simply record.. The cache and map cache were emptied.. Live tracking disabled. No offline map.. The week streak was off. My device was a iPhone 17 Pro Max.

I'm quite behind on writing the komoot description for our adventures, and unfortunately, I can't recall everything I wanted to say about this hike. However, I remember that we felt an intense sense of discovery during our journey. I struggled to get the picnic bench highlight to appear on the Komoot map. In the end, I had to modify the trail leading to the picnic table in OpenStreetMap because it was marked as "Private." However, an official City of Eagan sign welcoming visitors at the beginning of the trail made me feel it was acceptable to change the permissions to public for hiking. And of course, I remember now, those pesky GPS signal dropouts on the komoot app were plaguing me again.. Gaia GPS had to come to my rescue again.

Today is a red-letter day because, once again, Komoot accurately recorded our entire hike while we simultaneously tracked it on four other apps: Gaia, AllTrails, Strava, and eBird. I tried several new things: I reinstalled Komoot on my iPhone, opened the other four tracking apps first, and then launched Komoot last. I made sure Komoot was in the foreground whenever I locked my iPhone so that, when it was in the background, it stayed at the front of the App Switcher. Finally, whenever I took a photo, I openedthe camera from the lock screen so that, when I closed it, it wouldn't keep running in the background. I don’t know if any of these changes made a difference. It could be one of them, a combination of several, or some other unidentified factor entirely. Regardless, I’m happy that Komoot worked as designed, and I’ll have to see whether following this procedure ensures that it continues to do so in the future. Even this short hike was an adventure, bringing the joy of an unexpected discovery: the Middle Creek Historic Cemetery. It lay at the end of a spur off the trail, atop a heavily wooded hill, with only one grave monument still standing. It reminded me of visiting the cemeteries of early Missouri settlers on my mother’s side of the family—one in a grove of trees surrounded by cornfields in northern Missouri, the other in a grove of trees in a cow pasture in the Missouri Ozarks.

I discovered this trail on AllTrails, and it's now featured on komoot. This short loop trail connects to a larger trail network in Spring Lake Regional Park, on the north side of Shoreline Boulevard. Martha and I hiked there in December 2023. Sadly, the komoot track suffered from many GPS signal dropouts, so I had to upload the recorded Gaia track to komoot.

Before setting out on this hike, I cleared both the cache and the map cache and turned off the Live Tracking that had been active. I then switched on airplane mode but forgot to turn it off before recording the hike. I did not use the navigation feature to record the route, and komoot was the only app running. Happily, the recorded track was accurate, though I now wish I had changed only one variable at a time instead of four at once. On my next hike that afternoon, I reactivated Live Tracking, and the recorded hike was again accurate. This leads me to believe that what most likely made the difference was clearing the cache and map cache. In retrospect, I wish I had not forgotten to turn on airplane mode, and that I had tried turning off Live Tracking before clearing the cache. Nevertheless, I'm happy that the app seems to be recording my activity accurately again. Now I have to see if I can replicate this before concluding for sure that the problem is fixed.