High Sierra Topix

I got fairly involved at OSM over the spring / early summer. A lot of the keys there seem half baked, and very focused on the Swiss Alpine Club scale. One of the two photos for trail_visibility=good includes a path which is unmarked and has no visibility for ~150 feet or so lol. It's also amusing seeing "mountain hiking" as the difficulty in, say, Needles NP.

I've been fixing/updating things here and there in OSM (though I'm more the occasional newbie) and have come across things I found confusing or non-ideal. Similarly (but different!) to my pondering on how to get YDS more useful, I've floated some ideas for input based on breaking describing trails into three axis - hiking technique, path exposure, and path visibility.

Technique (this was pretty solid from the get go but got some great feedback)
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/r ... ers/99869/

Exposure (this evolved quite a lot)
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/r ... ale/99885/

Visibility (the least thought out)
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/r ... ity/99971/

Similar to the thread here a while back discussing social trails with little to no visibility (which ended in repeated demands to source / prove information I shared from a discussion with the former SEKI trails manager, which I did), this is looking at having a few labeled waypoints for XC routes as is the current best practice in the US alpine community when sharing routes. I've deleted a few "trails" that had no ground truth to them and sliced up others where appropriate.

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/r ... hs/98815/2

A more meta take on smoothness and surface tagging on for trails/paths

https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/r ... ity/99971/

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This involved learning more about international systems which was fun. There's a lot of overlap, but also deviation which is often inspired by very different terrain, but not always.

There's been a lot of good points made in the above threads (which really go on, so they're more for geeking out), which I think really clarifies on how to express exposure in an easily understable but useful way as well as delving more into the distinction between YDS Class 1 & 2. For trails I've come to think it's actually useful having two grades of Class 1, possibly even three (SAC has two). I'm not sure I'd bother with my little YDS side project as it focuses on XC, but I having a 1.0 be "casual walking" and a 1.5 be "surefooted walking" makes a lot of sense with how most people view trails. Reading AllTrails comments for some very simple (to me) dayhikes near the Olympic Peninsula was illuminating.

There's a good mix of constructive criticism, pushback, and some trolling heh. Overall it's a pretty thoughtful and systematic thinking community.

It sounds like you've been deeply engaged in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) community, actively contributing and discussing various aspects related to trail mapping and classification. Your efforts to improve the accuracy and clarity of trail information are commendable. It's not uncommon to encounter a mix of constructive criticism, pushback, and occasional trolling in online communities.

Keep up the good work, and your dedication to improving trail data in OSM will undoubtedly benefit the outdoor community and enthusiasts worldwide! If you have any topics you'd like to discuss further, feel free to let me know.

The constructive criticism and pushback has generally been very useful and things are definitely ending up better than what I would have come up with on my own.

There was one guy that was basically trolling that I wore down lol. More annoying to me are very vocal people with their own eccentric viewpoints (how useful is surface or smoothness for backcountry trails? pretty much the entire PCT is smoothness=impassible lol), but overall it's been good. I've been busy this summer between work and backcountry, but I look forward to finalizing the foot_scale draft in oct/nov and I think the whole pathless routes thing can get a nice resolution soon as well.

I'm in the #trails group in Slack under the same username.