I’m genuinely pleased when people tell me about bugs or improvements related to OpenSnowMap map style by emailing me or by openning issues in github1,2. So, the least I can do is to try to fix them.

I’m happy to announce that a new style is being rolled out on OpenSnowMap that address some of them.

Here is an overview of the visible changes. For a better knowledge of the technical background, suffice to know that the piste database is now powered by Imposm instead of Osm2pgsql, and that the style is written in cartoCSS instead of bare mapnik XML.

Nordic and Crosscountry Skiing - Can I ski there ?

As the maintainer of OpenSnowMap, one thing I don’t want is to send your reckless grandma in an icy, treacherous slope. I’s also like to avoid to invite you to try an un-groomed backcountry piste you spot on the map with your skates.

So now, if piste:difficulty or piste:grooming is not mapped on piste:type=nordic ways, the piste shows a ? question mark on the map. Also, if not fully tagged, the more you zoom, the fainter the piste become. The goal of making the map less nice-looking is to ensure that lazy mappers will look twice at their contributions.

On the other hand, if you map properly the grooming type, icons and a dashed pattern will appears to distinguih between:

piste:grooming=classic piste:grooming=skating piste:grooming=scooter piste:grooming=backcountry Just have a look at the Oslo area to see what it means.

Also, if you tag the relevant section of any piste way with the proper piste:difficulty, you will see the small warning pictogram appear just where it’s useful, and not everywhere.

If difficulties are color-coded in your area, OpenSnowMap knows how to take care of the colour tag applied to a type=route, route=piste, piste:type=nordic relation. This is probably where you’d like to put this colour, while actually map the difficulty of every way composing the piste according to the wiki description for nordic pistes.

For those who wonder, the default XC pistes colors is the one in my area. If it’s not the same where you ski, map the relations colours.

Skitour and Backcountry Downhill

For ages, a skitour descent is explicitely described in the wiki as to be mapped as piste:type=downhill, piste:grooming=backcountry. Sorry, I missed that until now. Both piste:type=downhill, piste:grooming=backcountry and piste:type=skitour are now displayed with the same kind of dot pattern and the small backpacker-wearing skier icon. Also they are are painted with the same difficulty color-code than downhill runs.

Only the piste overlay is updated for now

The piste+relief overlay and the base map are too big to be re-rendered now. We have to wait for the northern hemisphere summer to see that happening without overloading the server. When this happens, the base map forest color will be dimmed down so that the XC pistes stand out more on the map.

Opensnowmap Legend

The map legend now looks like this: