1. https://cavecountrytrails.com/

Outdoor lovers in the region now have access to “Kentucky’s primary trail resource” as Cave Country Trails launched a new website June 1, with the vision to “create a regional network of biking, hiking, equestrian and water trails to connect communities” and make the Mammoth Cave area and southcentral Kentucky a more attractive outdoor destination, according to the website.

Cavecountrytrails.com displays 179 trails across Barren, Butler, Edmonson, Hart, Simpson and Warren counties, making “trails more accessible to our community and those that visit our towns,” Cave Country Trails Project Manager Rachelle Wright said. 

“I’m ridiculously proud of it,” Wright said. “The amount of information that we have labored to pull together to make one massive resource, I’m just super proud.”

Wright said compiling the content for the 179 trails took “every part of six months.” Despite all the work, it’s uncertain if all the trails in the region have been identified. 

“We’re not even sure that we’ve got them (the trails) all yet,” Wright said. “We’ve done a lot of research for a year to try and gather all this information correctly … but even then, we know we might have forgotten something along the way.”

Funding for the website came from an American Rescue Plan Act grant of $150,000, given to Cave Country Trails “to recoup the money that was lost for these organizations (individual tourism commissions) and for these regions during COVID,” Executive Director for the Edmonson County Tourism Convention Commission Vanessa Ulm said. Of the $150,000, Cave Country Trails used $12,000 to fund the website. 

“The pot of money that was granted for us was a huge jump for us in being able to start that project, get those trails identified, get those assets we need out there, show those people on the trails,” Ulm said.

Trail identification, a new brand and logo as well as project management filled out the rest of the grant.

While it is too early for Cave Country Trails to gather a full scope of the public’s opinion on the website, a staging site before the official launch garnered praise from those who saw the website, as early users “feel like it’s an easy to use tool with pretty good user experience,” Wright said.

User experience was a main concern for the Cave Country Trails team when designing the website. Features that help build “the best user experience we could make,” Wright said, include sorting ability between location and types of trails, an interactive map and information for county tourism offices around the trails.