Hey there! I’m here because I used your maps for planning trips in the past and ran into some trouble. So I followed the trail back from my map provider (German alpine club’s App) to this thread.
My issue with this is: Where did you extract the rating for the paths from? Me and others found that especially in France the Swiss hiking scale (T-rating) doesn’t always add up with what we are used to from Austria and Switzerland. This makes for some not so funny complications when planning a multi day trip and suddenly arriving at a path that is way more difficult then said by the map. I know from rock climbing that for each region there are local deviations in scales, but I think in an international community there might be some options to unify things.
Thanks in advance,
Kiwi
Hi! can you give some examples of trouble you’ve had with path tagging in France? there’s definitely room for improvement here, and maybe it’s something we can address locally.
To answer your question, in theory, the rating should adhere to the documentation here: Key:sac_scale - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Usually, a mapper sets the rating based on his or her judgement, unless the rating is stated clearly, for example on sign posts. Individual mappers might diverge, but there is a consensus that the rating is usually only off by one level in such a case.
I have seen cases where people set the rating just based on what they think “a difficult hiking” is without consulting the wiki and without knowledge of the SAC scale according to the Swis mountain club. Then it can be off a lot. The cases I have seen were all in one direction. The OSM difficultu was a lot higher than the real one (so T5 indicated for somethign that was T2). Note that OSM criteruia differ slightly from what the Swiss club says (details in the wiki).
Hey, thank you for getting back to me so soon!
One example is the north ridge of Grand Fache (42.812694, -0.239070), marked as T3. I checked again with the official definitions by SAC and realized that it actually might still fall into the definition although it doesn’t resemble my experience from other regions. The definition states that „The more exposed areas can be secured“. In my experience even T4 trails are secured largely by fixed ropes. Looking at your wiki this observation seems to be affirmed by the words of „Exposed areas ordinarily secured with fixed ropes or chains“. At the bespoke grand fache trail on the other hand you’re looking at a classic ridge climb with sometimes less obvious trail and no fixed ropes or maintenance aids like slide fixing poles.
In the end I’m not sure anymore wether this falls into your capacity as mappers or wether it’s a more general discussion on hiking/climbing/mountaineering grading in the respective community. Still, as a user of your maps I would urge you to err on the side of caution. I would rather walk on a path marked as T4 and find out it’s just a T2 stroll then pull through a section that is marked as T2 just to find out that it really is a T5 and in the worst case not being able to reverse the moves and finding myself in a helicopter on the way down. The latter is happening a lot for various reasons, one being people following blindly a trail marked on a map.
On another side Note: In mountaineering communities people share gpx files. So I see absolutely no need to map out mountaineering pathways („ideas“) like you discussed above and like I have seen on the map in Switzerland. If there is a trail on a map you will find someone who follows it blindly without getting into the nitty gritty of small dots or smaller dots.
Thx. I am forwarding it to the French OSM outdoors crowd. I hope it will trigger actions.
I understand that it is only an example, but here is what I make of it. First, a personal note: I’ve never walked this precise part of HRP, nor ever been above Marcadau in this direction, so I had to read about it in various French-speaking sites. I found various mentions of this as “a hike” in topic titles, but when going into the text there were mentions of II+, “gas”, “mountaineering path”, “people tetanized by fear”.
- the whole climb from Refuge Marcadau has been created as a local hiking route 9 years ago, without mentioning the source or the operator. We have no way to determine if it’s an official route or just a personal suggestion. Given its creation date I would bet on the latter, but I found a mention of signmarking on a site so I asked a friend of mine who belongs to Club Pyrénéen. We are trying to clean up such routes when we find them, but there has been no organized hunt for them; maybe we should organize one.
- the path itself has an interesting history. First created 9 years ago (by a different user than the route) with sac_scale=hiking then corrected a few years ago by a hiker whom I know (Hades34) and who set it to sac_scale=demanding_mountain_hiking. Why did he choose this value? was he afraid of being accused of exaggeration? did he read “demanding mountain hiking” too literally? what source was he using?
In this case all boils down to “old OSM history”. How do we set about to cleaning this up? Ideally, we mappers would have an authoritative source to use instead of making our own decisions; but obviously these sources would have to be other maps and we are back to square 1. Another ideal would be that hiking and climbing federations collaborate with us to rate paths and routes directly in OSM, but the path to there is very steep.
Thank you for your thorough investigation! When I initially posted I was thinking of getting more information on how the Pyrenees are rated and how to translate to future plans on what paths to use. I didn’t grasp a bit of the original discussion of this thread. Sorry if I ended up in the completely wrong place!
Nevertheless I did my share and read through this thread and the other one that sprung from your poll. It’s quite a discussion you had going on in here!
Concerning my example: I think this path has every right to be there. When I went there last year there were many people walking it and as far as I know a local pilgrimage takes place on this path every year. The only thing that puzzled me was the grading because that wasn’t in line with what I am used to from Austria/Switzerland. The grand fache trail contains some climbing UIAA II sections and includes sustained scrambling in steep/exposed terrain on occasionally loose rock. You can verify this here , check „la suite de topo“ after the description and scroll down to pictures. I think a reevaluation of the rating might be in place BUT only if the surrounding area is revised too, because otherwise we‘d end up with one trail rated correctly and many others with off ratings.
But I would like to make some remarks on the topic as a whole too from a user perspective after reading your discussion. I am an avid hiker with a little mountaineering experience and I do rock climbing for over 20 years. I am also following closely the joint alpine clubs and mountain guide journal „bergundsteigen“ who are primarily concerned with mountain safety issues.
In this particular journal there was an article last year about digital maps. Two notions might be of interest to you: the first was about some person who got seriously hurt because they followed a virtual path that let them down a cliff. The second was that open source maps like OSM should be treated with care because of creators errors.
Reading through your discussion I sometimes had the feeling that some people aren’t aware of the responsibly they bear when creating a path on a map. If there is any ambition to make something usable for a broad audience out of OSM, I would strongly suggest to adhere to what is common sense in hiking and mountaineering. In my perspective that means
- That no experimental paths should be rendered to third party apps before reviewed independently
- Only paths that are covered by the SAC T-scale should be marked as paths (wich excludes everything exceeding UIAA II by definition)
- Scrambling, mountaineering (eg glacier crossing) or climbing should be a different category, accessible only by activating the respective layer and must be graded in the respective scale: UIAA for scrambling and climbing, SAC mountaineering scale (F to ED) for glacier/combined trails aso.
- Rating/grading should also be reviewed independently
As an example from sport climbing: If someone sets/opens a route they suggest a rating wich is then accepted by others who repeat the ascend. Sometimes all the different ratings are combined to an average value. This way a more holistic picture of a route’s difficulty is achieved. This doesn’t mediate for regional differences but it prevents from one persons very subjective view on something.
As for the responsibly I mentioned above: the maps you people create end up in many hands and many of them have little to no experience in the mountain ranges. These people cause many emergency responses due to their lack of orienteering skill and their trust in smartphone navigation. It is by no means a cartographers fault if someone follows their trail blindly and gets seriously hurt. Every map and source should be interpreted with care, but especially after reading this thread I would advise everyone less experienced then a seasoned mountaineer to double check a route planned in OSM with an official map as I am used to after getting lost once following an OSM path… Still I think you wouldn’t want someone to get hurt because of a path you created.
On the other hand I see great benefits in what you are doing here! Especially mapping out things that are hard to fit in other maps like mountaineering paths, scrambles and the likes makes for a great platform for all sorts of people!
Sorry for this very long comment but maybe someone here can make something of it!
I still think, this post merits its own topic, perhaps you can come up with a cute title? French interpretations of (pseudo) Swiss Grading? comes to mind, but I know, this is needlessly controversial…
Maybe we could call it „reasonable grading of mountaineering routes“. 
The SAC (mind the caps) says, the upper grades in their mountain hiking scale can be more challenging/demanding than the lower grades in their “Hochtouren” (mountaineering) scale. They also say, that above T3 usually is not something that people colloquially call hiking. But that is just the SAC, we here OSM.
I think that’s an important notion, most people aren’t aware of! When I look at a map and I recognize a widely used and officially defined scale of hiking path difficulties, my first thought wouldn’t be to search for the mapping community’s internal wiki to check how they interpret the scale. When in doubt I would first check for the scale itself and the authorities who defined it. Knowing that OSM is a community with an „open to map“ policy I would the sooner come to the conclusion that the grading is just erratic due to community error then to check for internal definitions. After all that’s the reason why I’m here. I only heard of the wiki and your internal definitions because of this thread.
from the very top of Tags - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Conventions are agreed on the meaning and use of tags, which are captured on this wiki. Though in some relatively minor cases there are competing visions what tags actually mean, or mappers using them in a different ways.
The very same article was printed in the magazine of our local rambling club. Here to the flipbook https://www.alpenverein.at/bk/bergauf/bergauf2025/Bergauf_2_2025/html5/index.html?pn=41 (Unfortunately, zooming does not work in my browser.)
I very much like the photos, especially the first one! The posture of the person staring at the landslide where the path was - so telling! The author also shows remarkable sympathy for openstreetmap, the article is far from a bashing piece, rather sharp and on topic of pros and cons throughout.
Perhaps the person in the landslide picture just pondered: Does that turn the path into a T5 or a T6? That would be fully in what the specifications provide. (In my mind, there is just a destroyed:highway=path to be seen.)
I still think, your entry post in this topic merits a split. BTW.
I studied the mailing list posts that lead to sac_scale. Mostly people from Germany that where on holidays in Switzerland and looking for something new to map. Being afraid of that their ramblings and scramblings would not be appreciated if mapped as footways the effort languished. Then along came highway=path and they hit home with flying flags.
Nowadays, such “erratic gradings” best handled with changeset comments or placing notes on the main page.
PS: Reading and writing along here, I actually came to the conclusion, that highway=path is a subjective tag. Having seen myself quite some - and looking at a number of notes stating the same - that lack a bit in reproducability.
PPS: When in sac_scale=alpine* terrain, personally I often see more paths than are in the map, that is possibilities to traverse the terrain. It is only when I start asking myself, which one of those is the path that belongs into openstreetmap data, I am sometimes at a loss. I told a friend – we sometimes go over pathless terrain, and s:he likes to yell “Traces” : “Now do you see the path?” and I got told: “Well, you could walk over there just the same.”
You might be interested to know that the debate in the French community triggered by your message has recently been compounded by a Facebook post from the mountain rescue service who was alerting hikers about another similar “path” in a nearby mountain (“La Montagnette”, somewhat closer to Pico de Aneto). Twice they had to save experimented groups of hikers from what the rescuers did not consider as paths at all.
We are currently trying to convert the debates into:
- urgent action, which could serve as a sandbox for the rest of the community
- the equivalent of a local “Trails Working Group” with more focus on safety, in the hope of eliciting mapping principles approved by mountain professionals