How to Actually Use Shred The Gnar for Finding Dirt Jumps
Shred The Gnar is a mobile app that aggregates user-submitted mountain biking jumps, trails, and terrain features across North America and parts of Europe. It functions as both a discovery tool and a social platform for riders who want to locate dirt jumps, berms, drop-offs, and other freeride features without relying on word of mouth or riding around aimlessly. The core workflow is straightforward. Download the app, create an account, and let it ping your location. You will see a map dotted with pins representing featured spots. Tap any pin to get direction, difficulty rating, photos, and rider comments. The difficulty system uses a proprietary scale that roughly maps to trail ratings — green for beginner, blue for intermediate, black for advanced — though I have found the classifications to be consistently one notch more conservative than real-world difficulty, which actually works in your favor because it prevents intermediate riders from bombing into features they cannot actually handle. The search filter is where most people fumble. You can filter by feature type — jump, drop, wall ride, table top — and by surface type, which matters because the app includes both natural dirt features and man-made pump tracks or skatepark installations. If you are looking specifically for raw dirt jumps, make sure you deselect the concrete and metal categories, otherwise your results will include skatepark bowls and ramp structures that have nothing to do with off-road riding.
I encountered a specific problem early on that caught me off guard. A pinned jump near my area had a difficulty listed as intermediate, but the GPS coordinates placed it at the end of a singletrack that was completely overgrown and unrideable. The trail access point had been blocked by city maintenance six months prior and nobody had updated the listing. What I ended up doing was cross-referencing the pin with recent Strava segments in the same coordinate radius, checking Google Street View for the approach trail condition, and then reading the most recent comment thread where another rider had documented the closure. The workaround was basically treating Shred The Gnar as a starting point rather than a reliable source of truth. The data is crowd-sourced and the update cadence is unpredictable, so every spot you plan to ride should be independently verified before you drive there. One thing the app does well that most people overlook is the feature history and photo timestamps. When you open a jump listing, the photos are sorted by date. Older photos showing green, maintained takeouts versus recent photos showing eroded edges or exposed rocks will tell you more about current rideability than the difficulty rating ever will. I once rode a feature classified as "advanced" that looked far more manageable in the latest submitted photo, only to find the landing zone had been mowed down to grass the week before. The app rating hadn't changed, but the visual evidence had. The lesson is to always check the recency of the media before committing to a ride plan. The community submission process is actually useful if you participate in it. After you ride a spot, you can add your own photos and notes about the current condition. This does two things: it helps other riders avoid the same surprises, and it subtly trains the algorithm to surface your local area more prominently when nearby users search. The app also occasionally sends push notifications about newly added features within a ten-mile radius, which is how I found a handful of spots that never made it onto any trail database I use regularly.
There are real limitations worth being honest about. The coverage outside the United States is thin. Canada has solid coverage in British Columbia and Alberta, but once you move into the Maritimes or the territories, the map goes sparse quickly. Europe has scattered entries in bikepacking hubs like Moab-level areas in Spain and the Alps, but it is not comprehensive. If you are riding outside the American West or Pacific Northwest, plan on supplementing this with Trailforks or MTB Project for primary navigation and using Shred The Gnar only as a secondary discovery layer. Another bottleneck is the lack of real-time trail status updates. Unlike some cycling apps that integrate with municipal or land management APIs, Shred The Gnar has no mechanism for flags like "closed for wildlife" or "flooded." You are entirely dependent on user comments, which are only as current as the last person who posted. Before riding anything on public land, always check with the managing agency — the app will not do that for you and getting caught riding a closed feature can result in fines or permanent access loss for the entire local riding community. The premium tier exists and it removes ads and adds unlimited saved routes, but the free version is fully functional for casual use. If you are riding locally a few times a month, there is no compelling reason to upgrade unless you frequently save large numbers of spots for offline access, which is a feature some riders rely on in areas with dead cell service. The offline map download works, but it only caches the map tiles and pins you have explicitly opened — it will not preload an entire region for you, so manage your expectations if you are heading into the backcountry.
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The practical takeaway is that Shred The Gnar is a legitimate tool for discovering dirt jumps you would not otherwise find, but it requires the same verification discipline you would apply to any crowd-sourced outdoor resource. Ride the photos, not just the rating. Cross-reference access points. Update your own submissions when conditions change. The app fills a gap that dedicated trail databases do not address — niche freeride features like standalone dirt jumps and backyard-style jumps that are not part of formal trail systems — and it does that job adequately as long as you treat it as one input among several rather than the final authority.
