Crown lands rec trails (calgary area), when is it a goat trail and when does it need to be on the map?

Communities Canada
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Howdy, i am reaching out to the community to gauge what the protocol is for mapping of informal trails in the crown lands / parks used for hiking, biking, recreational activities, etc.. The issue i am encountering out here in Calgary area is that while someone has gone through the effort of importing their own or other’s GPX files they show little to no actual activity on a source like strava heat map data. While i don’t want to delete someone’s work, I am concerned that some of these trails are bush wacks and singular trips taken by someone without any formal designation or real use long term. Yet they were named and attributed to an individual (in the calgary area Bob Spirko’s site seems cited or Brendan Clark is often cited too, i don’t know who they are nor would i think anyone else would either) lending authenticity and i suspect possible confusion for map and trail users expecting it to be of quality if they blindly followed it. The formalized mapped and named trails that appear on our provincial crown lands trails, trail forks, all trails have the activity and tagging to help them stand out but where is the line on these goat trails that others try to abide by?

So i guess the questions for the hive mind :

-The spirit of OSM seems to be map everything, but when are these goat trails more problematic to users than beneficial? Is Bob Spirko’s (or whoever’s) stomp through the woods now a sacred route worthy of mapping and naming?

-how are these handled elsewhere with self imposed names, untagged quality of trail etc.. to help a potential user be equipped to keep on more formal paths, informal? poor visibility? unverified? notes? there are turkey trails everywhere so we still need them, but how do we make it quality for users?

-how would/should paths be “sunset” or “decommissioned” when they clearly have no usage, how would you go about this tactfully and safely. Is the fix me / notes system sufficient to flag for comments and review, set a review by date to revisit ? I can’t possibly self verify all of them in person directly nor am i even an expert or authority in this if i did, it needs community feedback somehow.

-just looking for some friendly guidance from experienced folks before i get myself out in the weeds or messing anything up for anyone else. Or just a nudge in the right direction to completely steer clear of it and focus on the established core routes as i have been up to now.

thanks buds :slight_smile:

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IF you decide to “remove” a trail, for whatever reason, I recomment changing it from highway=path to abandoned:highway=path or whichever lifecycle prefix seems appropriate. It allows for easy reversion if necesarry. As for when … that’s above my pay grade :zany_face:

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thanks, that’s a solid tip to use lifecycle tags to keep the history and ways just in case and its an easy revert for anyone too. I am pretty gunshy on deleting anything because someone might need it too, but want to make it useful just the same.

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I would start from writing a changeset comment on one of their edits, politely asking them is this an actual path, now overgrown path or is it a record of a single trip across pathless land.

It is not a method that always works, but is a good first step in case of doubt what is going on with edits that someone else made.

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Hi, I am Brendan Clark.

Not sure if you folks on this thread are local hiker/scramblers or not, but a lot these are routes up more obscure mountains in the Canadian Rockies. They are extremely helpful for navigation as it helps avoid cliffs, etc. They are very well used by the local scrambling and climbing community and are essential resources of beta.

Please do not alter/remove these routes without very good reason (for example, there’s a better more common route now established).

Just because they are not popular on Strava, etc, does not mean they aren’t very helpful resources for the people that use them. The Canadian Rockies are very big and very wild and there are a lot of remote locations that aren’t visited frequently.

Cheers, Brendan

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Note: the way it’s commonly “tagged” for locals to understand is as follows: an actual path fully visible on the ground will be called a “trail” and a less-defined path will be called a “route” in the TITLE of the way.

The distinction of TRAIL versus ROUTE is well used by local guidebook authors and local mountaineers.

Routes will often provide scramblers and mountaineers a way of getting up a mountain, although the actual trail visibility may vary widely. In some cases a route will just have small sections of visible path and/or rock cairns to guide the way.

We have fooled around with SAC scale tagging, but the SAC scale is not very appropriate for the Canadian Rockies for multiple reasons.

The Canadian Rockies have a LOT of very remote areas without well defined trails. This may be difficult for people unfamiliar with the Canadian Rockies to understand. The mapped routes are often essential to ensure we don’t get lost or off-track in the mountains.

I would ask you please consult me before deleting/changing/moving these routes as I added the vast majority of them to OSM over the course of the past decade.

Cheers, Brendan

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Sounds like Tag:informal=yes - OpenStreetMap Wiki may be appropriate for some of these trails.

Aso some good discussion of this issue across OSM here: Why can't I delete this trail? - OpenStreetMap Wiki

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Thanks bud! That is a ton of useful background and information thank you very much for taking the time to resopnd!

To set you at ease, no I have not been removing routes and i will refrain from working on them if you are the local, self tasked with editing them. I’ve only dipped into the Bragg creek area where it’s busy and obvious where the routes are and where they have fallen behind on GPS data like strava and visuals to provide updates and it has mostly focused on MTB, “official” routes as listed on sources. But the turkey trails just gave me pause and want to try reach out to others in the area to see what was up. (not that i could do anything with them anyway as there is no data to improve upon)

I get there are far more technical routes that will never have the strava traffic but i do think it is of note that it is a cause for confusion to us casuals that hop out to the woods every few weeks without reliance on guide books and deep lore to fill in the blanks. I suppose the best ammo here is just to beef up the official trails as much as possible with tags and details to help it be apparent which i am more than happy to do as i explore more and more of them.

Anyway i will leave it as a not my problem or wheelhouse to deal with i guess and focus on other areas in the woods i am more familiar with.

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Hmm, no, I don’t agree. I would argue 99% of the trails in my area are unofficial or informal.

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100% agree it’s confusing. I stopped venturing out to the mountains (EDIT: now that I think about it…) about more than 10 years ago, so these ‘routes’ aren’t something I’ve ever really paid much attention to. I’ll have to crack open my old waterproof Gem Trek maps and see if they stick to the ‘trail’ vs. ‘route’ nomenclature; it’s been so long I don’t recall. :grimacing:

Frankly, while beefing up the official ‘trails’ with more info is a good thing, I think the unofficial ‘routes’ ought to be beefed up as much as possible with tags and details too. Regardless of the lack of desire to use sac_scale (which I don’t blame anybody in North America for not wanting to use, because I had never even heard of it until I had seen it documented on the OSM wiki years ago), it’s maybe even more important to tag the ‘trails’ ‘ROUTES’ as informal, with appropriate visibility, etc.

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Informal routes being voluminous isn’t a particularly good reason to not tag them as such in OSM. :face_with_diagonal_mouth:

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I agree with you that the official trails should be beefed up with tags. If you’re working in an area like West Bragg or one of the very popular hiking/mountain biking areas, the situation is a little different there as that area has mostly official trails (because it’s close to the city).

Once you start heading further west like past Prairie Mtn towards the Powderface Trail on Hwy 66, or down Hwy 40, the trails become much more unofficial and informal to the point where I’d say 99% of things out there are not recognized at all by Alberta Parks.

I do absolutely agree with you that the best way forward is to prop up the official trails and make them stand out more. There honestly aren’t many official trails so it’s probably not hard to do. The issue you’ll start to find is that you’ll see a lot of traffic on unofficial trails or routes. The only way to know which trails are official is to check the AB Parks maps. You’ll probably be surprised to see that only a very small fraction of the trails are “official”. The rest are informal, even if they are well travelled.

Again, this may be hard for somebody to understand or comprehend if they are not familiar with the area. In my experience, I have spoken with many European visitors to Canada who are familiar with hiking in the Alps. They are often confused by the lack of signage, trail markings, well-defined paths, etc. That is simply the nature of our mountain areas and part of what makes them a joy to explore - because they feel wild and natural.

But this is why I push for keeping all informal trails and routes on the OSM map. I don’t think it helps to mark things as informal because almost everything is informal.

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Gemtrek absolutely does show trails vs routes (routes are dotted lines), although within the national parks they won’t show unofficial trails or routes (even if they are extremely popular).

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Does tagging informal routes as such change their visibility on certain maps layers? If so, tagging all the informal trails and routes appropriately will remove 99% of the trails, which is not a helpful “feature”.

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I’m mapping along the Icefields Parkway, and I’ve found many similar trails. Most/all of them have names like “TheNameOfThatSummit route”, and if the trailhead is busy (according to Strava), the traffic decreases as the route is becoming more challenging. I knew the meaning of the word “route” in mountaineering, but I wasn’t sure if it applied to these trails. Now I’m certain it does.

But what if @KevinOs did not bring it here and simply remove these “goat trails”, or @brendan714 did not contribute to this tread?

I suggest clarifying the “Canadian Tagging Guidelines” regarding these “routes” so that a contributor can avoid deleting them in good faith with a simple search.

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Here is a snippet from a local professionally made map (brand name Gem Trek, very popular here).

Note the only OFFICIAL trails are those in red dash. All of the black dash are unofficial trails and all of the black dots are unofficial routes. All are named appropriately as such. There are also many more trails and routes I know of that are not shown on this map - part of why OSM is awesome because we’ve surpassed the info available on professional maps - but I think we all know that otherwise we wouldn’t be here.

Anyway, I really like the way these Gem Trek maps are shown. If (big if) there was a way to tag things to make it look like THIS on most map layers, that would be great. Official trails stand out. You can tell trails vs routes. Routes are not hidden or shown in tiny lines, they still stand out well. Everything deserves to be on the map, even if it’s not the most popular thing.

As I said, the best tool we have right now is to name things TRAIL vs ROUTE, but I also like the suggestion from Kevin to make the official trails stand out more, like how it’s shown here.

I also agree the Canadian Rockies mapping standards should be updated (this is not the first time I’ve had to explain this to OSM mappers), I would be willing to help but I don’t know where or how to do that.

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Thank you. We need first to get a consensus on an appropriate tagging (if changes are required), then documenting it will be easy.

There was a (too long) discussion last year about how to map mountaineer routes. A proposal was supposed to be done, but I have not found anything yet. I have asked the proposer for an update.

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I think there’s a fundamental misunderstanding here about what the point of the data entry on OSM is…

Tagging a highway=path with informal=yes marks it as an informal path; that’s all. What renderers choose to do with that information is up to the renderers, and it’s against the basic principles of OpenStreetMap to “tag for the renderer” to make map features show up in a particular way on a user’s renderer of choice.

Whether an informal path is displayed more or less prominently on your rendered map of choice is entirely irrelevant with respect to whether it ought to be mapped as such on OSM.

What Kevin was suggesting was not “making the official trails stand out more” in the sense of physically appearing as a thicker, more colourful or whatever line on a map: it’s entirely up to renderers to figure out how they want to display things. But adding the appropriate tagging will allow renderers of the data to display the trails more prominently, if they so choose.

Right now the only difference between a maintained ‘trail’ and a blazed ‘route’ in the OSM data is the mere appearance of the words ‘trail’ and ‘route’ in the name=* key, and that, frankly, sucks. It’s totally insufficient for discerning the differences between these. What Kevin and I are suggesting is to elaborate on the tagging of all of the trails and routes, so that if someone wants to make a map not unlike a Gem Trek map they will be able to do so. Right now pretty much all users of the OSM can’t make a map like that because the trails and routes are tagged the exact same way: from a data perspective there’s nothing distinguishing a ‘trail’ from a ‘route’ at all.

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First of all, I think you misunderstand Kevin as he says “I suppose the best ammo here is just to beef up the official trails as much as possible with tags and details to help it be apparent which i am more than happy to do as i explore more and more of them.”

I am fully in favour of beefing up the official trails with tags.

The unfortunate reality is that if you tag something in such a way that it disappears off the commonly used and publicly available maps, apps, etc, people will not be happy. I understand that is not the “right” way to think, but it is the reality.

Most people are not map makers or map editors, they are simply users. I fear the “informal” tag is not appropriate because that implies that they are less important or lower priority than other trails, which is not at all true in this specific case related to the Canadian Rockies. Many informal trails or routes are actually the most popular.

From the informal page:

“Features tagged as informal=yes could be completely unmaintained and might be considered with lower priority by routers.”

No, this not true in the Canadian Rockies!! A lot of these “unofficial” trails or routes have regular maintenance and are extremely well travelled!

Now I would very much be in favour of something along the lines of a comment, or otherwise a very specific tag that can be applied to the Canadian Rockies, marking these as, say, “CRtag=unofficial_route”. That way, if somebody wanted to make a specific map for the Canadian Rockies, they can use the specific tags we’ve identified particularly for this region.

I find a lot of the OSM “blanket” tags are simply not appropriate to use in our area. SAC_scale is the most obvious that comes to mind, I fear “informal” is not the right tag to use either.

Again, I understand it’s up to the mapper on how you make the tags look on the map. But I fear the most common mappers out there (used by the majority of websites, apps, etc), may render the informal tag in a way that is detrimental to the users of the area. I also don’t agree that the definition of an informal tag is appropriate for this use case.

Hopefully I’m making my point that I think it’s more complicated than simply slapping an “informal” sticker on these and calling it done. I don’t agree that this achieves the goal and I fear this may do more harm than good.

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I agree it would be useful to clarify how to tag all trails and routes. However, if you want to create an international consensus, you need to start a thread in General talk> Tagging. The scope of the Canadian forum is more limited.

In the meantime, pending an international consensus I am not aware of, I think that agreeing on some tagging scheme for these “routes” in Canada is needed for two reasons:

  • This could prevent the silent removal of these “routes” from unaware contributors (as long as they look at the Canadian tagging guidelines).
  • Once an international consensus is reached regarding trail and route tagging (if ever), it will be easier to find and upgrade these “routes” accordingly.

I could therefore easily agree to add informal=yes, or visibility=no, or both, or any other tag, or even use relation=route, provided that it is not contrary to their common usage, does not make these “routes” disappear on Standard OSM map or Tracestrack Topo, and is relevant in our context.