Once upon a time, I was asked why I had only marked the south end of a trail and not the north end.

Well, I said, I haven’t been there, so I don’t have a GPS track. All I have is that USGS line and the one thing I know about it is it’s wrong. As long as it isn’t mapped, someone will be more likely to put down the correct line when they do want to map it. They might not even notice it’s needed if a bad line is there.

Then I said I might come down on the side of mapping everything you can as best you can sometime later.

Well, it’s later. Now I say map it all! And put down the source as you do it. Not just in the changeset note, but actually on the segment. And it can be good to make a guess about trail_visibility. I have more tools now.

Strava heatmap is the best as an average of GPS signals, if you can get it. I have found what is probably the firefighter loop through nearby private lands and not actually available to the public as a hike on there. It looks like a nice loop out there in Kneeland where there’s no public hiking. Only the most popular trails have enough heat to be an average. A random spattering of others have some kind of clues.

I can download system trails from the Forest Service’s data clearinghouse. Most of these match the Forest Service Topo (another source), but some have updated. Some of them match the USGS lines. Okay, a lot. And apparently Six Rivers has no system trails at all. They are seriously slacking. (And now a section of their roads has vanished from the Interactive Visitor Map. What is wrong with you, Six Rivers?)

And there’s ever more imagery. Sometimes it’s just visible. All the other lines available helps to differentiate the actual bit of trail from random fallen trees that make a line on the ground. A ridge trail might have a fuel break competing with trail, so there are plenty of bad signals just looking at photos. Down the gully, that might be just water course. Or trail. Or both.

So I’ve been working my way through the roads around the Trinity Alps Wilderness and some areas around Marble Mountain Wilderness and now the trails are going in. (I think I’ve got all the roads on the north side, west besides the reservation, and southwest sorted through.) I’ve just about got all the system trails in. Got a few things from USGS. Will have to ask Chris about his Orleans District trail maps. Shasta-Trinity has decided to usurp the Salmon Summit name for a bit that isn’t Salmon Summit while Six Rivers, where the National Recreation Trail actually goes, sits there without trails. There’s some “footpath” marked stuff that needs adjusted. Footpaths are for more developed trails than generally found in a designated Wilderness. Still lots to do.

Oh, and those trailhead parkings 200 feet inside the designated Wilderness? Mapping that as is. Ground truth!