Ever since visiting Mount Lassic and then making edits in the region, I’ve had this nagging difficulty: What to do with a mountain whose high point is named differently? Mount Lassic has three peaks, the highest is called Signal Peak. I eventually mapped its survey point, which is also called Mount Lassic, and hoped that was done. (Apparently I shouldn’t map survey points except at the exact point indicated, so I’ve done this WRONG. I’ll just name a peak “Such-and-such Benchmark” then. Except a benchmark is specifically a vertical control and most at peaks are horizontal controls. “Such-and-such Triangulation Station” gets a bit long. Oh, the humanity!) Unfortunately, if one searches for the mountain, one only gets the Mount Lassic Wilderness and the Mount Lassic Trail, but there’s no hint that this goes to the high point of Mount Lassic. It goes, in fact, to “Signal Peak”.

Other places where there’s a named high point (peak) different from the main mountain are Marble Mountain (with Black Marble Mountain the high point). Someone seems to have simply marked a lower peak as Marble Mountain. If one does this, there’s a bit of a debate if it is the highest white peak or the most prominent white peak. Mount Konocti with high point Wright Peak. Currently both are marked close to the high point, but the main mountain has been given a lower elevation so doesn’t show often, but it is searchable.

Ideally, this all renders such that one sees the mountain name at low zoom and get individual peaks at high zoom. For purposes of clarity, I am using “mountain” to mean the landmass that may have many peaks and “peak” to refer to points where every direction is downhill. I think this is common English usage, but I’ve seen areas of maps where it looks like the usage was reversed. The only solution above that renders all eventually is the one on Marble Mountain. However, the result is not as desired and false. And which peak to you demote the actual mountain to? Mount Konocti has several named peaks to push the mount down.

Discussions in the past have gone on to relations. There’s a few in use, either of type “site” or “multipolygon” or suggested “multipoint”. Another solution is to mark the area as a natural=mountain. None of it gets rendered, but perhaps the renderers just need to catch up. All of it is currently used somewhere.

For the relations, some objections are that while points and ways are obvious from the start, even many experienced mappers don’t quite get relations. Count me among them. I’ve tried a few route relations. (And I should get back to the California Coastal Trail, I suppose.) There’s a comment about multipolygons being a bad idea after all. I’m definitely not going to delve into that. I went ahead and tried a site relation for Mount Lassic, first dropping on the other two minor peaks with the bare minimum of information. It still isn’t searchable and doesn’t render. My objections are that if someone adds a peak that should be part of the relation, it may or may not every get included.

Objections to marking an area as a natural=mountain are that the area is quite nebulous. The objectors liken the indistinct nature of where the mountain is to that of already “in use” natural=mountain_range, which seems to lack understanding that mountain ranges have many sub-ranges. Peakbagger.com will list 5 levels of ranges for any particular peak. Being part of the Rocky Mountains is far from the end of the story for mountain ranges. Mountains really don’t have so much difficulty. One person points out the object in drawing is to mark a general area that gets labeled, but that area itself is never expected to be rendered.

Although I’ve made a stab at making a relation, I think an area is best. I’m surprised that there’s 20 uses of natural=mountain worldwide and some of them don’t even make sense. How does a mountain have a leaf_type? (I must be doing this wrong?) There’s a quite old multilingual proposal. There’s a region:type that’s clearly getting discouraged now. There’s another 115 uses of natural=peak applied to ways, which seem to be generally closed. Here is one solving the problem of the different peak and mountain names.

Seriously, it’s cute that there’s a Bears Ears East and Bears Ears West, but when I zoom out, there should just be Bears Ears. It might be nice to find Maroon Bells on the map instead of Maroon Peak when zoomed out. It might be nice to have the various Mount Massive peaks represented and still known as part of the whole too.

Also, natural=mountain_range probably needs a bit of work in spite of the 5000+ uses already. The focus here is just getting the mountains right.

In the past, as I’ve traveled, I’ve found it pretty easy to find a library when I need one. I have offline maps from OpenAndroMaps that I use with OruxMaps. I open it to my search area and ask it where the libraries are and it gives me a few. Suddenly this is failing. Perhaps it was already failing and I wasn’t finding as many as are there.

The first failure was in Etna, California. OSM directed me to a parking lot with no library around it. Luckily, I had signal that worked and could find an address 1.5 blocks away. This mark got moved when I got home.

The second failure was in Ely, Nevada. This is the county seat. There is no way they don’t have a library. My map said no. Again, I had some signal and was able to find an address. It’s a big building next to the courthouse, well lit and full of books and has excellent internet. Now that I’ve located it on OSM, I found it was marked as a post office. There’s one post office in Ely and it’s off on the east edge of town. USPS doesn’t know about this one. It’s all better now. The White Pine County Library lives!

The third failure was in Hawthorne, Nevada. This was a lesser failure. When I was lazy and just searched for something with the word “library”, I got nothing. But when wandered through the menus to search the type, I got it. It just needed to be named. Now it is the Mineral County Library.

Before, I had suspected that someone had gone through and systematically added libraries. Maybe they have and just haven’t gotten to Nevada and northern California. In Utah, I was even able to find out about the tiny library in Bluff, housed in the old jail! It’s so small it was only open 2 days a week for a few hours. At that time, it was one of the only libraries that left the internet on while closed. (I’m glad a lot more do this now. Is there a tag for that?)

Anyway, libraries, very important mapping and there’s some still in need!

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!

There must be another name for these. There has to be a tag for them. They’re so common!

But I see in highway=trailhead that a “trail register” is something you might want to tag exists at a trailhead. Yep. How? It doesn’t mention that.

Trying to dig about and find what others have decided on their own. I found some
tourism=information
information=route_marker
name=Trail Register
in New York. In another cluster of two are some
tourism=information
information=board
name=Trail Register
I’ve seen some in the Wind River Range in Wyoming that were built into the information board. I guess it could be an information board with a register. It’s not a route marker. In fact, the one I’m staring at at the moment is at the parking which is somewhat offset from the actual start of the trail. Look, it’s a ridge. There’s room here and the trail is over there. Deal.

In Connecticut, I’ve found a single
tourism=information
information=route_marker
trail_register=yes
so there’s some more support for calling it a route marker. It’s not! It sorta can be. But it’s not!

I’ve found a
tourism=information
information=trail_register
in southern California similarly in Iceland
information=trail_register
man_made=cairn
name=Arnarfellsbrekka
and, I mean, what? I guess maybe a named cairn could have a register. Certainly cairns and peak registers go together. Those are usually a little less official than the registers at trailheads.

I have to admit, this simpler one seems best. I see why people are attracted to putting this down as tourism=information since the comments people leave are often the best source for information about the trail conditions you are about to experience. I may have accidentally weighted my search for this tag, though. Not all of it, but the later of it.

So one can do user defined values for information=, one does not have to choose from the small selection in the wiki. I’m going with…

tourism=information
information=trail_register

Unless someone can mention that just ain’t British enough. I sure wouldn’t know. Certainly all but one of the examples I found were in the United States.

Making plans, so checking on the many sources for good hikes in an area. First, because it’s Six Rivers National Forest (mainly), I glance over the Forest Service topographic maps. There’s not a lot of trails showing on there in the area, but there’s three heading up to a selection of lookouts. There’s also a bunch of quarter mile spurs. Why? What sense do these make?

I check the USGS, but these are generally older and the information was supplied by the Forest Service anyway.

For the basic well known things, check AllTrails. It says you can cross country up Black Lassic. (I knew that already.) A community content tab appeared a few years back and you can find some good things here sometimes, but it’s always buried in a load of strange. There’s a bunch of strange in this area. Strange strange. Usually there’s a lot of long bike rides, but not here. Someone has apparently hiked the river underneath the reservoir. That’s fancy.

Hiking Project will often have a different set of trails. Actually, I find this a much more useable app for finding trails. Some of that is because even the free version will let you easily have the whole state downloaded. (It’s funding by outdoor venders and if they encourage you to wear out your gear, you’ll buy more gear.) Unfortunately it only has the nearby National Recreation Trail I already know about.

Geocaching can actually be a good lead on hikes. I used to live by Ojai and trails that weren’t on the map would be lined with geocaches every tenth of a mile, which made finding them easy. And you know people go there because they did and left geocaches. Logs on those are often better about telling about the trail than AllTrails reviewers. Here, you might get someone marking either a start or a destination they think is awesome. It takes more work to find these hints, but they tend to be excellent when you do. (I had a great hike in Colorado getting to a geocache specifically set at someone’s special place. I was the second signer after 7 years, so I’m disappointed with my fellow finders. It really was a special place.)

Peakbagger is another niche way to sort out some possible hikes, specifically to peaks. (And lookouts. Good for lookouts, which are generally on peaks.)

And of course you’ve got to check OpenStreetMap. People drop trails on here that are found nowhere else. Okay, sometimes it’s nonsense. So I look at this southern portion of Trinity County… and it’s a web of residential roads. Someone went through marking a few of the big routes as tertiary roads and there’s even a secondary road. Most of those are only roughly along the actual road, and it’s not just an offset problem. And there’s only a few points to represent those roads. Humboldt to the west and Tehama to the east have much better marked roads, although they too are residential streets in this area. Those counties are richer. Trinity has one incorporated area in the whole county and it’s at the other end. Their single hospital is still at 100% utilization of ICU beds because there are 0 of them. (Counties in New Mexico are screaming, “Luxury!” Counties in the east aren’t understanding why this is important since everything in the next county is so close. It’s all relative.)

Anyway, the roads are WRONG. I must FIX them. And almost 5 12 hour days (after an hour on Saturday, I went out for the regular volunteering to pull out invasive marram grass from the sand dunes, then back) of correcting and adding and sometimes even subtracting, there’s still a lot to do. Finally looking at roads, I’ve learned a lot about roads. I’ll need to rewrite the bit on them I did for my blog post trying to encourage a reader or two into editing.

Eventually I’ll have to actually sort out my plan too. It’s hot out there and only getting hotter. Plus lightning. It’s also getting closer to when the Lassics lupine will bloom. Always good to look up the designated Wilderness and other special areas. You might find something exciting that way, too. I hope I get to see the Lassics lupine blooming.

amenity=hitching_post
Short and easy, 214 uses.

tourism=trail_riding_rest
Well, it may contain one or more hitching posts. 1 use. That’ll be the person who wrote it up for the wiki and linked it about for good visibility. Ooh, and it’s rendered on the trail riding map. Perhaps it was made because other resting places are possible, so this becomes a unifying tag to look for if you are looking for a place to rest your horse? Much like a tourism=trail_riding_station seems to be a unifying tag to put on all the different things you can overnight your horse in? (1339 uses for that one, it’s doing a better job. Oh, except that I looked at how it was actually being used and some of it was for staging locations where overnighting would be illegal. So not all correct uses. And I can definitely see where the confusion comes from.) Although if these things are meant to be a unifying device, used in addition to the more specific tags, it probably ought to say that on the wiki page. Is that even how tags are meant to be used? I certainly see the utility.

amenity=animal_hitch
animal_hitch=ring/rail/post
horse=yes
er…
mule=yes
donkey=yes
llama=yes
Perhaps you should just be assuming your zebra/donkey cross or whatever other exotic bit of stock you’ve got =yes? Except if you’re in big horn sheep country, it very well might be that goat=no.
104 uses for all animals, but it isn’t popular enough to get combination details. For the type tag, there are 83 rings and 7 rails, but no posts at all. Nope, the people don’t want it for hitching posts. Well, except for the sorts who get particular about the post being horizontal between two other posts, AKA a rail. Or particular about there being a ring on the post, but the example dog_hitch (not kidding) is also a ring.
Oh, there’s also 2 uses of amenity=horse_hitch.

amenity=horse_parking
32 uses although this one got voted on and rejected. However, there was a lovely little wiki page for a moment that included a type of parking that was box, which is to say, a corral as often mapped on USFS maps. I liked it just for that. Oh, I suppose the animal_hitch can be similarly done even though it is a little more than a hitch. (Is it, though? Is it really?) I marked a bunch as trail_riding_stations a while ago, but see above that this may be intended as much more general. They need more tags to truly be marked.

So…
I was marking the picnic table across the wide trail from the hitching post and the map board next to it, so I decided to mark the hitching post too. How could I not when I know all these methods and I know it is there? And which method would I choose? Well, it turned out to be amenity=hitching_post, one and done.

But maybe it should be that animal_hitch that wins out. It feels so awkward at first, but I also like the hierarchical nature of it. (That’s another reason why the horse_parking was just a little bit cool.) (Also, hierarchical sorts of things naturally require more than one tag in total animosity with the desire to just use one tag and be done.)

I’ve been thinking about adding a man_made=corral to those trail_riding_stations I marked. There’s a few uses of it, especially by one user in New Mexico. (More than all the amenity=hitching_post.) My only difficulty is that there’s two very distinct structures that get marked as corrals on USFS maps. The one to corral herd animals in when gathering them up seems like the more natural corral. Then again, the places that actually get a corral place name are more commonly these overnighting spots for horses (and other riding/packing stock). But not exclusively. Really, USFS sees no difference between these two things if you take them by their maps.

Maybe I should be trying to extend this apparently more winning amenity=animal_hitch with the animal_hitch=box that was suggested as a type of horse parking. And while I say more winning, the amenity=hitching_post still has more than twice as many uses. For a total just over 200! Clearly no one really cares.

Just looking it up as a corral only found this one person asking how to, but they are actually describing an arena. When I was a camp counselor for a summer and generally did the horse units, there was one advanced unit that did an overnight ride. We rode to a place with an arena and made do with that to keep the horses overnight. It doesn’t have the watering and feeding station common to these, but plenty of room to keep nearly 3 dozen horses from running off, including the one that would untie any knot no matter how complicated.

It can’t be just a western US thing. You find them all over on Forest Service maps as a little dotted square with “corral” written next to them. They’re on USGS too. The #1 answer on the question refers to this Riding page on the wiki, but then gets the wrong answer for this or a corral. It might match another sort of corral, maybe.

A “corral” is a temporary space for keeping stock animals. They really come in two types although they are marked the same on the USFS and USGS maps. The type that’s most important to me to map is usually smaller, just a fenced box with a gate on one side. There’s usually a trough for water and a bit of wire to hold a bit of alfalfa. Sometimes there’s a spigot. (It’s a good idea to assume these are non-potable water.) The second type is for collecting herded animals, such as cows or sheep. These are usually larger and more elaborate, having a long arm of fencing that funnels the animals into the enclosure. There is often a ramp for loading the animals into a truck. This second is probably known to those who need to know it and the general public would only be looking up “what is that?”, but the first is an amenity that someone might be searching for.

Part of the answer

Turns out I shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss that Riding page just because it hasn’t got “corral” in it anywhere. Down toward the bottom is a tourism=trail_riding_station, which is exactly what I was wanting. So now I can get on with tagging a few.

Someone carefully marked all the fencing on the one at Soap Creek Corral, but not the 5-8 gates. I’m not feeling enthusiastic enough to add in the gates. I marked the area and tagged it. The area seems to vanish from selectable things in iD, but I can find it in JOSM. I’m not sure this is something that comes up on this horse centered map, which is a problem with the map, if you ask me. Anyway, there’s not been enough time to be sure.

While marking off the many corrals along NM-15 in Gila National Forest, I found that TJ Corral had it’s corral marked as an area of fence that was also tagged “man_made=corral”, which is not an option that appears in the Key:man_made wiki page. Another person who knows my pain and made up a tag in desperation! (Well, man_made can take any value after all.) I do think the “trail riding station” is more specific in a useful way, though. There’s a little over 300 of these corrals vs. nearly 1300 trail riding stations. (Since it looks like most of those are this person, they were probably feeling this pain a bit more.)

Still questioning

That still leaves the other sort of corral, the sort that animals are herded into, but still “temporary accomodation” in the words of the Riding wiki page, to label. Suggestions on that arena described as a corral were: landuse=animal_keeping, animal_keeping=horse, animal_keeping:type=paddock. Whatever a paddock is. Apparently there’s a difference of opinion between the English speakers and the German writing the wiki page. I’ve encountered the word, but not entirely sure what it means. Something horse-y, a place to keep. It probably doesn’t apply anyway.

Tried something like that at the sheep corral on Lizard Head Pass. Pretty sure it’s not correct. What would be? iD suggests landuse=animal_enclosure as an option, but there’s nothing in the wiki about this. What talk I can find about it is tagging in zoos. Here is a cow corral in Pueblo Park that I’ve made a similar attempt at. (Didn’t tag it fixme like the first.) It feels at least fairly correct except maybe the type.

Looks like this might just get called a “pen”, but seems far too general to be useful as well as not capturing the essential feature that keeping animals here is only temporary. Using that as a thread to pull, I come to “farmyard=stockyard” which “is an area used to temporarily hold livestock, generally with many fences”. This seems like it’s getting close. But this comes from “landuse=farmyard”, but there are no dwelling or other buildings. This is public land! Public Department of Agriculture, land of many uses, land. Maybe this is still closer to what I want? Nothing is certain.

I expect this is only a problem in those places that have wild camping allowed as the norm. Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands fall into this category and cover a lot of the western United States and a little of the eastern ones. I’ve failed at finding an answer via search engine. There could be something on the wiki for the tourism=camp_site tag, but it’s not there now.

For me, this question has come up specifically in mapping backcountry (hiking) areas where camping is generally allowed wherever a person might want to settle for the night, but there is often a lake where camping has been banned outright. This is more than the usual banning of camping within 100 feet of water that is often found in Congressionally designated Wilderness areas. This is for singled out areas.

Some examples:

Sheep Lake in West Elk Wilderness. (38.7534N, 107.2366W – See rule 6 here.) No camping within ¼ mile.

Gilpin Lake, Gold Creek Lake, and Three Island Lake in Mount Zirkel Wilderness. (40.7825N, 106.6793W – See here.) No camping within ¼ mile.

Shadow Lake in Ansel Adams Wilderness. (37.6946N, 119.1243W – See here.) No camping at the lake or between the trail and creek.

Thousand Island Lake in Ansel Adams Wilderness. (37.7202N, 119.1796W – Same link.) No camping within ¼ mile of the outlet.

Lower Golden Trout Lake in John Muir Wilderness. (37.2410N, 118.7207W – Same link.) No camping within 500 feet of the lake.

Crystal Lake in Hoover Wilderness. (38.0003N, 119.2454W – Same link.) No camping at lake. There’s quite a few more at this link, but this covers all the wildernesses represented.

Geneva Lake (and many more) in Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness. (39.0969N, 107.0775W – See here.) Camping in designated (numbered) sites only. Sites have been marked at Geneva Lake, but not at Capitol Lake, for instance. Included to show a less restrictive case.

While I wouldn’t expect to see the blanket regulation (no camping within 100 feet of water) represented on the map, I would like to see these special cases.

As a second subject, it would be nice if larger areas could be marked for camping or no, particularly when the answer is an unexpected one. Bureau of Land Management generally allows camping wherever you like, but the Lacks Creek Management Area (boundaries seem to be unmarked currently) only allows camping in designated sites. The Forest Service also generally allows dispersed camping, but not in particular areas like the Turquoise Lake Recreation Area (another missing thing). My local California State Parks are pretty clear: only in designated sites, but the National Parks can get a little complicated. Usually it is a no. Nearby Redwood National Park is designated only except for seasonal dispersed backpacking camps on Redwood Creek gravel bars. Congressionally designated wilderness areas of Sequoia National Park, Kings Canyon National Park, and Yosemite National Park all do allow dispersed camping (with various restrictions like those above). Death Valley National Park gets complicated. There’s no dispersed camping in the parts that were National Monument, but the part added when it became a park, very roughly half the area, does allow dispersed camping. It certainly would be nice to be able to add that blanket information to the boundary relation.

But I’m mostly interested in the very small areas where camping is prohibited in an otherwise permissive area. tourism=camp_site, access=no? And then I get a red area marked with a tent with a circle and a bar through it on my map?

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.

I tend to wonder a bit about this community we supposedly have. In about 6 years of edits, but only about 200 edits, I had one single interaction with community and it’s still bugging me 2 years later.

You see, this character wandered over to my changeset and commented that they had removed a trail because it “might be misleading” and they couldn’t find it on their USGS map.

Which is cute considering the USGS for the area doesn’t date back to 1995 like much of them. It dates back to 1960. You can’t find the Redwood National Park on most of it, much less any of the trails the park has made. You find the logging roads the park has actively and successfully decommissioned. The one thing you can be sure about USGS for this area is that it is wrong. Heck, I hiked on a combination of Forest Service and USGS maps all over the west for a couple years and I’ve gotten to a point that if I see these two sources agreeing, I am certain I’ll run into something very different on the ground. It’s better than a coin flip. So it’s not even uncommon that USGS is wrong. It’s just particularly wrong in this area. And it should be obvious.

But it wasn’t to this new then mapper. So they submitted this changeset to “exclude a non-existing trail”.

It’s an official trail! It literally has signs at both ends pointing it out! When you get a permit to backpack here, they send you a map that includes this trail! Yes, with all those fords that have been left swimming there in the creek. I painstakingly got it onto that map using my GPS track from actually hiking this actual trail and imagery. That track bounced around a lot there under the big trees making it quite an effort. I want this trail back.

So that bit of community didn’t leave a good taste.

On the other hand, some have pointed out that there’s always a community in knowing you’re part of a great bit project. Got to admit I’ve always felt that one. And the straight up selfish suspicion that the more edits I do, the more likely someone will notice OSM was super useful to them and start making it useful in all the places they go, and on and on. There’s that too. Because at some point I’d like to be able to, when looking at FSTopo and USGS maps thinking “How will these be massively wrong today?” when they agree, then look at OSM and say “Ah, that’s how,” rather than finding out the hard way.

And that bit of community has always been pretty good.

For this area beside the Blue Ridge Wilderness, I started out by adding what I knew of the Dangerous Park Trail and the Pueblo Park Interpretive Trail. There were a few miles of Dangerous Park already on the map, but they didn’t get all the way to the park. Unfortunately, the trail was diverging from what the Forest Service claims at the point I left it, so the little bit to the northern terminus includes guesswork. There’s some trail visible there.

I then worked on stuff in the wilderness and primitive area near the state line. It looks like someone has added in the trails from FS information (including attribution) in this area. I had a couple of adjustments based on my GPS, but the trail routes look good. I’m not sure if these are downloaded tracks or copied from the FSTopo. I’m seeing some changes between the two. The tracks that can be downloaded are more recent. I added signs to the mix. Guideposts and an information board. And parking.

I wanted to add the trails that connect to Dangerous Park, so I took the time to figure out downloading FS trail data again. There’s only about 4 different ways. Do they all connect to the same database or is it possible does one have to choose the right one to get the most recent data? All kinds of regulations are encoded into the tags on these trails. There’s also an indication of the state of the trail in “trail class”. Class 1 and 2 are generally represented here. Class 1 is minimally maintained and tread is intermittent and indistinct. Class 2 expects tread to be continuous, but still rough. Class 3 is continuous and obvious tread. These are trail_visibility statements! Always good to have that included.

So I got those trails added and while I was at it, I adjusted a few roads onto their route and added names and numbers. Lots of roads were called Saddle Mountain that are actually something else including a main one that is the Frisco Divide Road.

I also noticed that while someone added the bit of Dangerous Park I increased, they also added a line for WS Mountain, which heads south from the same area. I’m not sure why they did this as there was already a longer line for it already existing.

As I poke around the area to write this entry, I’m also seeing other things that need done. I didn’t add the information board that is by that trail or the little bit of road for parking at the trailhead and now I’ve seen a missing trail on the wilderness side. Oh dear.

Those not withstanding, I may be done with these edits. The earlier excursions were in Chiricahua, which has been mapped exceptionally well including trail visibility, SAC difficulty, trails are really on route, guideposts are there. Well, that’s what I remember from hiking it before, anyway. Maybe I should still check it? There were excursions along the CDT south of Lordsburg and the trail definitely isn’t perfect there, but I have limited feelings about the value of improving it. My personal improvements would be to move it so it climbs a thing once in a while instead of plodding along service roads for cattle water. It’s so much better when one gets high up. But that’s something to tell the folks who decide on the route and if they agree, then map it. There were excursions that were off trail. Nothing to map there.

I decided to continue trying to use JOSM for this area. I added details around the Narraguinnep Fort Historical Site, which was not simple. To add a point, I sit there in add mode and only click once so it doesn’t become a line? Hopefully that is so because that’s what I did. Then tracking down appropriate tags ended up meaning doing the same thing in iD, so not exactly a good use of time.

I continued on to details of the road around the Benchmark lookout. The track type changes halfway along. It’s nearly the boundary of the USGS map quads, so easy to miss, but they actually marked it. The road stops being improved dirt and becomes high clearance right in the middle. I did manage to figure out from JOSM how to mark that. In fact, now things are getting marked with tracktype. Smoothness was always presented, but maybe not as clear.

I decided to continue on with roads. The Forest Service marks various around the area as primary (trapezoid with an extra line markers on the map, maintained to passenger car standards) and secondary (horizontal numbers in a rectangle, should be to passenger car standards) and as 4x4 (vertical numbers in a rectangle, get the truck or even ATV). So how should one apply them? And why are they all marked as county roads, sometimes with segments with alternating numbers? None of it makes sense. I added some and lengthened some and adjusted some as I could see so their routes are all matching reality a bit better.

Then I decided the manual water pump at Bradfield Campground should be shown. While I was at it, it would be nice if the day use and campground areas were clearly marked, so I started in on doing some shapes. Just click around until back where you started? Hopefully that’s right. It seemed to have the expected result. There’s a handicapped site, so add that somewhat. I added the table, which is covered and handicapped accessible. There’s a toilet that is also that is nearby. Another toilet between the areas. Other picnic tables that are covered. I sorted out where to find the tagging presets better. Getting all those dots marked was still a very annoying process.

I finally got JOSM to actually take me to errors when I check for them. It makes it entirely too easy not to notice there are errors before uploading. Still, there is hope and I’ve got the more detailed Strava heat map set up in it now.

This is really just down the road from the last bit. I decided to finally try out JOSM for editing. Everyone’s doing it? It was initially harder to do the simple things. Frustratingly, it wouldn’t let me start a new line rather than adding to an old one as I started adding the trail at the end of the stub of road at the Rio Lado trailhead. This trail was supposed to be a circle on the end of about 2 miles of trail, but I found about 2 miles of trail and, unrelated to the location of the circle, some other random trails. There were even equestrians on one of them. Back to the mapping, I found that joining these various lines was difficult and I even managed to upload one without any tags at all. I went back and fixed things with iD, which isn’t appropriate. It does say that there’s a steep learning curve.

Then I moved on to the Calico National Recreation Trail. This is a motorcycle trail, but it actually does see plenty of hikers and mountain bikers, too. I was aiming at a bunch of peak bagging along its spine, but apparently was too rusty in my packing of my overnight backpack. I tagged Elliot Peak and returned. Then I took a different route up to the mountain spine to tag a few more peaks in an overnight. Sockrider first and the namesake Calico last.

Here, the map seemed to only have jagged representations of the motorcycle trails of the area which usually stayed within half a mile of the actual trail. JOSM has a tool (shortcut w) that shines for this kind of moving a trail to the correct location and adding nodes between. Strava-iD has a less detailed, possibly older map. I’ve been trying to find the tile server address to use for a custom background in other editors, and someone has made that plain for the JOSM editor even though just searching for it generally didn’t work. That’s how popular JOSM is. So I have that data. It already has the FSTopo (in the transparent overlay form) as an option, another I’ve been searching for. Just searching for tile server addresses really hasn’t worked out for me.

Between those two, I moved the existing trails into lovely curvy things that should represent actual trails. I’ve noticed that there are spots where the general route of travel is not the actual trail. (Specifically, when I hiked it, I found trail around one sub-peak on the way to Sockrider that most were missing. The Strava heat doesn’t show it at all. I assure all, the trail is really there and nicer than the other.) Then I started in on added trails in the area that weren’t there at all. Some I can see a bit. One I hiked. Others, especially their lower bits, come from heat. A few are just the FSTopo version. There’s one more trail that’s visible on USGS that I haven’t added. I decided to add in the informal trails up a couple peaks too. Hopefully this isn’t a mistake with all the motorcycles. I also felt the need to add “motorcycles=no” on a few things even after “motor_vehicles=no”. Yeah, I didn’t just forget. The Motor Vehicles Use Map is the legal document that allows motor vehicle use and it says no motorcycles on these. Also, the Forest Service was doing a good job of signing it.

After a few iterations as I added in layers I could consult, I called this done.

I noticed that the further networks of trails also need a lot of adding, but getting further from where I actually hiked and knew about, I was getting uncomfortable with adding. Some of these have been removed from the current electronic recreation map. (Don’t know what to call this one. It’s powered by Esri and found on USDA sites to map where recreation opportunities exist.) Also uncomfortable were the trails that are on the rec map and the FSTopo and even the map at the Priest Gulch Trailhead, but seem to be at houses at the bottom.

Across the canyon is the Colorado Trail, and it’s a further adventures of badly handled CT. The old name is Highline Trail. The FSTopo puts the name Highline (without trail because they are inconsistent about writing trail on the end when it’s obviously a trail) on one side of the line and Colorado Trail on the other. Someone has named it “Highline - Co. Trail”. It’s two names. At least it doesn’t say (Segment #) after it. I found a couple trails without names and added them, but didn’t evaluate the route they take. Then I clicked on that route and decided to leave it all alone.

I had been in this area, then run to lower elevations for a storm, then back for some trails I still wanted to do.

Work for mapping began with Hope Lake, where someone had managed to number the trail, but not name it. After the lake, they’d just marked it with a fixme. Yes, it’s the same trail. Then I got to playing with things over the hill and there was more of this very minimal editing to improve. Then I ran into the Colorado Trail. Um. The Colorado Trail is a mess, frankly. Someone decided it should all be named “Colorado Trail (Segment #)”. This is an area where the trail runs along older named trails. The Forest Service went hyphenating the name onto the old name on their maps to keep them both on the map, but it is two different names. Someone had copied it over, including keeping the Colorado Trail on a differently named trail after the Colorado had left it. And then I started running into the segment numbers. Why? Why why why? That’s a whole project in itself.

So I quit that and moved on. I thought about doing the Sheep Mountain trail, which may be informal but is well maintained including an astonishing amount of logging out the old road it follows. Unfortunately, I only joined it halfway along on my way down. I didn’t like the look of the mountain where it goes and took on some easy, if steep, mountain instead. The log at the top indicates Teluride is up here all the time in the summer. I dithered and ultimately did add what I could. There are complete tracks on Peakbagger, so I could potentially add all of it depending on the license there.

I was surprised about Lizard Head Trail in that it wasn’t even named. Also the bathroom was at the wrong end of the lot. And there’s a half dozen information signs in the area. I went adding a whole session of stuff before uploading and starting in on the trail itself. I added a short spur trail on the way up Black Face as well as the high pools. Some of its route probably isn’t that good, but the trail is visible at the end of official trail, so it’s probably easy to follow on the ground. Up and over, I added in trail_visiblity since it suffers a little once at the top. Names and numbers all filled in. No bikes in the wilderness set. Cross Mountain was fine as trail, but the trailhead needed a lot of work. There’s a trail and bridge and it was fording the creek instead. The FS claims that little road is called Lizard Head, so it is. Someone has marked the trail along the buried power lines since I got my map downloaded. I’d had to just guess I could do that. (Lizard Head’s start had been sorted, too. Decades ago, it had a very different start. There’s been work done up here. It was much better already than what I’d had on hand from OSM.)

I even found something to do along the way to the trestle bridge. The FS is assuring me that all these roads, the one out to the corral too, are called Trestle until they become North Trout Lake at some indeterminate location. Except the loop for parking at the end of Galloping Goose, which is Trestle A. Then I decided that Galloping Goose needed a relation to show where it is. Then I found out that none of the trail sections of Galloping Goose have been mapped. It doesn’t follow the marked railroad route. I can’t see the trail in a lot of places. The Strava heat map indicates the trail actually does a few things very different from what the FS says. Of course, that’s not labeled so maybe it’s something else people have been following. Since I didn’t hike this, I decided now to do it after all.

I found an old mining road that’s being maintained as a trail while staying by the river, so I added that. Then I got all fiddly and added a bunch of driveways. I wish I’d taken a picture of the map BLM had on their information board at Caddis Flat Campground (added details about it) because that map had a more official trail a little further east, also leading to a mine.

I started off my excursions around Blue Lakes with explorations of what I suspected was an old mining road. It was clear it was from logging. It was also clear that although a few trees have come down, it’s being kept open for hiking. It certainly isn’t usable (or legal) for driving. I decided to add the system as a path. It’s outside the wilderness, so the bikes can use it too. Apparently I was almost to the end when I turned back.

I was surprised to see that the ATV trail hasn’t been mapped. I marked the bridge and got it a little further, but then it gets too close to the creek and the creek is often not in the right place and I got frustrated. It goes through to somewhere and connects to another trail that climbs soon after where I stopped. (That trail is also missing.)

So I attacked the dreaded West Elk. I think I started faltering on marking trail visibility near the end, but I started off well on Coal Mesa. I marked the camp good camps. I didn’t mark the spring I found to camp that first night… Maybe I have to go back. I made sure the trail was really clear around the peak, which has some problems. Stay low, whatever you do! It doesn’t look like much, but it goes very directly for the last 40 feet.

I didn’t add any of the trails I didn’t see anything at all of, and there’s a bunch. I did make sure everything off the side of North Baldy was marked. I managed to connect it to the trail even. Put down some cairns. It looks like it probably connects to Beaver Creek far down rather than going around the top of the bowl that Beaver Creek occupies.

All that informal stuff around West Elk Peak is now marked as such and has difficulty and visibility. There’s some trail visible down low on the evil T4 track going north from the peak, so I decided not to give it visibility=no.

Added some more camps I’d noted along the way. It’s good info, it is. I couldn’t note the no camping. There’s quite a few lakes that have no camping allowed within a quarter mile, so it is something that is needed. Google was uniquely unhelpful deciding I was on about subjects that have nothing to do with camping.

I marked some of the trail I found as I left Sheep Lake (and the nice camp along it!). I adjusted the junctions into something sensible that at least resembles what’s on the ground. I marked the south route down as visibility=no and added a note that I didn’t see any evidence it was ever there. I did find a track on the other side of the lake that wound around to the trail which included one blaze and a cut log. Nothing at all for the larger trail.

Then I marked Soap Creek from the junction with Soap Basin a bit closer to actual. Maybe it’ll be easier to find the ford and trail now. It’s easy enough to follow a few hundred feet after the junction except for one sudden right corner that it looks is missed both ways very often. Got some naming sorted on one side trail. Did little with the road except add the information board at the trailhead. Oops, forgot to add the trailhead.

I did do one major thing with the road. I marked Commissary in the right place. USGS and USFS maps both have it in the wrong spot. I also noted that the road changes there. I would drive my Scion up to Commissary. I would not, under any circumstances, continue from there. There’s parking there. It’s actually right at the benchmark that the road changes.

Before going to Dillon Pinnacles, I noticed one map shows the trail to the pinnacles (and a couple interpretive signs) while another shows a trail up Dillon Gulch. This trail predates the reservoir and just goes to a spring. (The map actually showed it just randomly starting at the water with no entry other than boat.) I found it signed and it is easy to trace all the way to the spring and no further as advertised. The sign was specifically giving the dates. The land between the NPS and USDA is state wildlife, I believe, and they don’t want you up there for the big game migration in late winter, early spring. And now you know from the map.

I hiked Ptarmigan Lake and pushed on to the nearby peak. The last part is cross country, but the since I did it by the road, I did almost all the trail. Since the road crosses the trail, I decided it would be good if it was mapped properly. The trail was marked T4. There is absolutely no point at which you need to get your hands out of your pockets for this trail. T3 is really pushing it. Everyone travels the trail next to the lake, which has huge steps and leaves the lake on a very steep slope. I noticed the higher trail (which one person was taking, so not quite everyone) that turns out to be very smooth and obviously the built one. I marked it, but only as old trail. Correctly, it should be marked as the actual trail.

There’s rumors there’s work happening on Lost Lake, so I didn’t touch that.

The picnic area over Cottonwood Pass has a well used trail to the edge of the wilderness. The old picnic area had a much larger trail that I found as I hiked about. There was a break and then obvious trail again as I hiked out to a big shoulder. I decided against adding this. My track is public for folks to see, though.

This hike up Turner Peak started along an informal trail that someone put up roughly. Might as well get it better. I didn’t bother with the rest of the track, but some of that on to the peak was very trail-like. Not so much my travel over to South Texas where the CDT travels now. I left it alone.

As expected, there’s not much to worry about on the Mineral Belt Trail. It had some signs missing and has a few less now. There’s a picnic area that wasn’t marked. It was a boy scout project. (Says on the sign.) It includes sighting tubes for the local mountains! Ah, but how do you mark those? I gave it a go.

I hiked a big loop with Busk Creek and the Highline Trail and CDT. That first was a nice trail in terms of the area traversed. I was surprised. It was a very hard trail to follow. I was finding trail continuing along the east side of the creek after I should have crossed, then it just stopped suddenly. It didn’t fade and get hard to follow. It stopped. I had to circle back a little further than indicated to find a way across and soon came upon a trail marker on a tree on the far side. The trail is marked for winter use with orange diamonds and otherwise not marked. It was clearly a road once and further up it was obvious. It gets enough use that when the old road becomes impassible, there’s obvious trail heading up the hill and around. There’s very few markers in the middle and lots as it turns to cross the creek again. That was an odd crossing. There was a lattice bridge with the water flowing through it. It was built on 8x8s that didn’t quite reach to anything on the sides. Somehow it held my weight. There were pallets nearby, but it wasn’t actually built of them. The spot would not make a good ford. I decided to leave the line of trail that didn’t cross the creek since the crossing looked so uncomfortable (even if I did do it). Maybe there’s something there the person who drew it knew about? There’s hints that this line was an outright guess. It wasn’t well placed where trail was obvious (due to being obvious road of cleared rocks) and the first crossing wasn’t right and it didn’t get all the way to the road. I cut off that and moved the line to a closer spot and connected it and drew it along to where I’d found it. There was a larger orange marker at the top, but otherwise no signs. Onward, the only real problem was the extra name on the trail. (The trailhead is Native Lake but the trail is Highline.) There were some missed corners and missing sign. I’ve tried to find a real name for the trail the CDT follows, but it’s just CDT where I see it. It’s getting called Colorado Trail, which happens to also follow here, but the person is incorrect on which follows which. I couldn’t be bothered to change that.

I hiked Elbert. Also well mapped except a really big corner that was missed. There’s trail work happening to reroute the north trail to somewhere better and the first spot was this corner. The second is still happening and so the trail will have to be moved in time. There are some spots where someone marked small extra trails that parallel the main trail. How are these supposed to be useful? There’s extra trails just going a little way off, too, and maybe those are. It was named as a descriptions, so I gave it its proper name. The south trail has had its rerouting and even has that up! The name was right on this one even though it’s popular to call it east. Then there’s CDT labeled as CT again. Whatever. I looked for some proper other name and didn’t find it. There’s a few old logging roads in the area that are getting hiked and although I’d have found it good information to have them mapped, I didn’t decide to do it.

Someone who doesn’t know that anything over 3 on the SAC scale is climbing was marking the SAC scale at one point. There’s lots of equipment needed for trails that are no more than scrambling according to them. Some of that had been corrected. I didn’t tackle the rest…

Hiked a big loop over Galena Mountain and along a ridge and down from Deckers Lake. There’s an old trail with one trail marker to suggest it was official once. I decided to put it on as hard to find and informal. Otherwise, my route was on CDT and off trail. I did add the Bear Lake Trailhead and fix the roads to it and added the trail that connects to the CDT. It’s information I’d wanted and not found. The FS put the trailhead on the map, but it doesn’t have any trail and is hard to see exactly where it is supposed to be marking.

Hiked another loop over Buckeye Peak. This had a lot of off trail too. Back was along some roads that had a lot of transposed points. I fixed up the road system and added the tent cabins that Ski Cooper rent. They’re sort of tree houses but not quite. Actually added in some of the perennial creek that was just sort of missing while having seasonal stuff above. Other than moving water features away from trails to their actual location so the trail doesn’t randomly cross it when it doesn’t, I don’t normally touch water features.