Went for a hike again yesterday. I'm in NY and it has finally cooled down to a comfortable sub 72F degrees for hiking. Hopefully I'll be able to get some good hikes in before it winter comes and it gets too cold. I really got out of shape by not hiking the past year.
So of course I brought my Gamrin Oregon with me to trace my tracks. I picked a section of Harriman State Park in NY (suburban NYC) that I had not tracked before. I basically picked up a section of trail, the Suffern Bear Mt trail, that I had left off at last time I was serious about putting these trails on the map. We'll see if I stick with it for a while and get back to working on the Appalachian Trail like I was talking about in my prior diary entry.
I also had a new addition with me that I got last year, but had not yet really brought on a major hike, my DROID phone. I've been on some minor little geocaching hikes with it and use OSMTracker to trace my tracks. So when I got home from the hike, I not only uploaded my Garmin tracks of yesterday's hikes, but I also finally uploaded the 8 different tracks that I had stored on my phone. For yesterday's hike, it was cool to see the slight difference between the tracks of the Garmin and the tracks of the Droid. From the looks of it, it appears that my Droid was more sensitive. I'll see about increasing the settings on the Garmin to get more accurate tracks. The trade off being, with limited memory, that I have to make sure I don't fill up the memory before my hike is over.
Maybe seeking some advice here. Since I uploaded the OSM Apps to my Droid a year ago, I wonder if there is a consensus on what Android smartphone apps work best? I'm using OSMTracker to record my tracks. It is nice to see the little notes, like parking, show up on Potlatch (the new version looks great BTW) waiting for me to edit over. I once tried something called Vespucci but never quite got it. Osmdroid, I feel, is best for just viewing the maps. So, any other recommendations?

I've been doing a bit of hiking the last few months. No major multi-day trips but I've had a few 10 mile + days. Up to now, my focus has been working on filling in the Long Path trail on the map. It is a 300 mile regional trail that runs north from New York City. Just a couple days ago, I completed the southern 50 miles of the trail, from the George Washington Bridge to the intersection with the Appalachian Trail.

About a month ago, I figured out how to use the routing features of the map. So I connected the whole 50 mile section with one routing tag relation "919642".

So now that I've intersected with the Appalachian Trail, and hiked a very small portion of it, I wanted to see what relations already exist for this major popular national trail. So I typed "Appalachian" into the "add a relation" feature in potlatch. I was surprised to see at least seven relations already exist. I picked what I thought was the best of them to label my section of the AT.

So, I'm thinking, since this is one 2,175 mile long continuous trail in the United States, it should have only one relation tag.
This page: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_United_States_Long_Distance_Trails
indicates that "156553" should be that relation that is used. It is a low number compared to the other relations so perhaps that means that it came first. It has two problems though. It lists the AMC as the operator. AMC only maintains a 300 mile portion of the trail. Other trail conference groups maintain other portions of the trail. So I would either want to remove the operator tag (and put it as one of the way tags for individual sections of the trail) or change it to Appalachian Trail Conservancy which is the main group overseeing the whole trail (as I understand it).

the other issue with "156553" is that it has a note attached to it that some extra nodes were removed. I think I will try to remove this note from the relation.

Are there any good hiking maps made with OSM that might show off the trails that I have made? Oh, just found this:
http://osm.lonvia.de/world_hiking.html?zoom=13&lat=41.20296&lon=-74.06751&layers=FFBT
If "AT" appears as a label of portions of the Appalachian Trail, how can I get "LP" to appear over my portions of the "long path"? Perhaps I need to capitalize the L and P in the name Long Path?

Just got started a few nights ago. Figured I'd start giving back since I downloaded the maps recently for a trip to Europe. They were great for getting around. I geocache so I had a collection of tracks for several trails in and around Harriman State Park in NY and Rockland County as well. So for starters, I spent a few hours the last couple nights, after uploading my tracks, tracing over my tracks for the trails in the parks. For those checking up, many of my tracks are private since they also included were I live. I'll see if I can edit the tracks to remove the private data so I can make them public. I also made some lakes based on the satellite photo data.
I guess any comments advising me how to tag better would be appreciated. The descriptions on the wiki pages, with the pictures, seem to be for Europe and some of the terms are unfamiliar to me. I suppose a consensus has already been reached on how to label items in the USA. For example, I'm not sure if I should label a hiking trail a "public footpath" or a "dirt track" or something else. In the USA, a "track" is usually associated with sports, a neat oval for racing.
So if you look at my additions, most of the ones that show up as dotted red lines, are tagged "footpath" and are hiking trails in the woods. Then I also made some others as well. The local park authority calls them "woods roads". They are wide enough for a single 4x4 vehicle. They are gated off for authorized vehicles only, I've seen park rangers use them. Some allow mountain bikes, and others allow horses. There are other "woods roads" that were included in the TIGER data that don't allow cars either. As of now, someone looking at the map might think that they can drive their private vehicle on these roads. Pine Meadow Rd. is a good example. I'd describe it as a restricted "woods road" and not anything like a "residential road". I might edit some of these roads at some point as well.
Is there a park in the USA that has been edited well enough for me to use as a template?
Some of the trails I added have blazes, paint markings on the trees and rocks to help guide hikers. Is there a good way to tag that useful information on the map?
I know some of the trail names as common knowledge. Other trail names I have to look up on a copyrighted map. Is it okay for me to use a copyrighted map that I bought or found on the internet to find information for the tags?