Well, I finally got around to trying to undelete the bit of trail in Redwood National Park between Tall Trees and Emerald Ridge, which didn’t take long because I’d already done the hard bit of finding which way that was by finding the deletion changeset. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of things in this area that nag at me. For instance, while I was (not) discovering if there was any reason the trail was deleted, I sorted out the nag about getting the seasonal bridges correctly tags for that attribute. Maybe. It could be “seasonal=summer/autumn” (used on the bridges) or “seasonal=dry_season” used on the trail. Does dry season start when the rains end or when the creek starts to get low too? Because that creek stays high into the dry, making summer/autumn possibly more accurate. Dry/wet season also can require some lookup. If I saw something was “wet_season” in the southwest US deserts, a few years ago I’d expect that means winter, but now I know it might actually mean July and August, when the monsoonal moisture comes through, but when the southwest US coast I grew up on has average monthly rainfall of 0.04 inches.

Most generous with the naggings are the “Orick Horse Trails”, a stacked set of loops built for horseback riding on the west side of Redwood Creek. They are built from good gravel service roads still in use by the park and old tracks decaying back to trail and a bit of trail too. Mostly it’s roads the public can’t drive. Before getting on with the subject of this entry, I had to deal with some really boneheaded stuff I’d done when getting them mapped at all some 2 years ago. Some of it is so boneheaded, it probably needs a content warning if any mappers are actually reading this. In one instance I apparently added in tiger: tags. Sure, if you don’t understand a tag, don’t delete it. But adding it in could be bad too! But there’s a wiki entry for these and you can delete them if the information is already included (or found inaccurate anyway). Apparently I set some “not:name” values that really should have been “old_name” as, while they are not currently what the trails are called, they are seen on the signs. It’s not wrong, just old. Then there’s the apex bad boneheaded what of setting those service roads to “designated” for vehicles. This was probably meant to convey that designated people could drive them, but that’s not what it means. It means those roads are meant for driving, which is very much wrong! So I had to do some fixing of the boneheaded.

Once I’d cleaned up the stupid I’d done before, and some random tagging of some of the service roads back to track roads plus one path into a track road by a random Amazon employee, I could get back to what was actually bothering me about this trail system constructed of roads. Whose point of view should the map reflect? I have this pie-in-the-sky idea it should be all things to all people. You tag it well with all the things and the land manager can come along and render it one way and get a map showing their roads that only they may use. The public can come along and use a standard renderer and be told there’s these trails you can circle around on. I’m pretty sure that’s not entirely wrong an impression, either. Answer: you don’t have to chose. Everyone gets their viewpoint.

How I get there, it seems at first glance, is to say it’s a road if I see a road. When it’s good gravel I would drive in my Scion if I had the key, it’s a road. These service roads are not all good, but most are. Land manager sees road including being able to drive it. I see road, which is a different experience to hike, but I can’t drive it. So I concluded mark it as a road. They need to be distinguished for the actual track roads in the area, some of which have been removed, some are removing themselves without help. That’s easy, because they’re service roads. They access bits of the National Park by employees.

But there’s problems with this. It ends up hiding the loops of trail. Those attributes that can be applied to paths certainly are discouraged from application to service roads (or track roads) in iD. And what kind is it? General access Park Service employees, which doesn’t seem to be a sort generally. It’s driveway and emergency services and such. If none of these fit, maybe you should be looking for a better tag, like highway=path, the wiki says, hinting that maybe my point of view should be it’s a trail, not a road.

The mountain bikers, who happen to be excluded from this bit of horse trail although generally allowed on horse trail in the area, certainly like to view this sort of thing as trail. It’s a “two track” as opposed to a “one track”, although they really are good roads and one very wide track. It’s talked about as trail.

It’s not really that rare a situation. The Arcata Community Forest has a collection of service roads and trails that the public’s trails follow. When I hiked in regional parks in the San Francisco Bay area, I’ve even seen signs warning me that (gasp!) the trail I was on was about to get too narrow for emergency vehicles, presumably so I know it’s a bad idea to settle into having a heart attack further along. These places do tend to mark it all as trails (highway=path).

So I’ve let go of my point of view it’s a road because someone can drive it. Diverted the idea that the land manager sees it as a road. I’ve changed things to highway=path so it’s all trails, then marked the road areas as 3 meters wide. And I suppose there’s a certain point of view that the land manager is perfectly capable of driving trails that are wider than the vehicle, so maybe it still preserves that all things to all people once it’s got enough tagging idea.

And it nicely distinguishes the trails from the leftover track roads, which should be treated with suspicion in this area. Although I know one that’s nice and I didn’t notice any “no access” signs on it.

Oh, yeah, and then I applied some lifecycle tags. See above about track roads getting removed and removing themselves. A removed:highway where I was actually looking for the thing to be sure I went the right way and never saw it seems sensible. A disused:highway where the trail leaves maintained road and no one but animals has been on the rest has a bit of logic. However, that seems to leave them unrendered. Whatever for the removed/overgrown one you can’t see, but the disused one is now a very distinct invitation for a wrong turn. I mean, there’s a line of rocks across the road and it gets distinctly dirtier, but there are people who can miss those clues. It would be nice if they knew ahead of time they are coming to a junction. “Will not confuse existing applications.” says the wiki. Um, the fact that it isn’t in prime shape doesn’t mean that track road doesn’t need to be rendered for walkers. If disused:highway means it doesn’t render, that qualifies as confusing existing applications. (Well, from my point of view.)

I also went and tried to improve Elam Camp and mark the trailhead. (I was sure I marked the trailhead when I hiked the levees…) The camp includes a corral. I’ve searched for how to tag these and only got one forum post asking about it. They were actually describing an arena and got answers that might do well for the sort of corral that cows and sheep get rounded up into. It doesn’t seem quite right for the little boxes for keeping stock in temporarily at camps and trailheads like the one at Elam.

Oh, the Redwood Creek levees in Orick… I should mark them as trail too? They are built by Army Corp of Engineers. The county has some responsibilities to them. The park service maintains them for walking, at least that’s what the ranger I talked to claimed. Also, no dogs, no matter what you see people actually doing.