I mean, there’s lots of ways to get easy dunks on other people’s comments if that’s what your into and don’t have an actual point to make. Just ask @SomeoneElse 
Way to own me though. Your so right that I have absolutely no idea what I’m talking about because someone from Washington wrote a book with the word “mountaineering” in it 
I remember you in the opposing camp praising sac_scale to be such a highly developed tag - quite the opposite of what your posts sound here. There were others from the US too. Somebody actually told me to hire a guide, if the terrain was to steep for me. That is why your posts here, that in my view make some sense, will not get any likes from me, e.g. because:
The SAC scale (mind the caps) is a hiking scale, the SAC also has a mountaineering scale. They overlap, if a route is mountaineering for one person in the party, the hiking scale must not be applied. It is only on OSM, that sac_scale is used for what is a mountaineering routes for most, not matter the abilities of participants.
When did I ever do that? I’m pretty sure the only discussion I was ever involved in about anything even slightly related to this was when you and me got in a minor spat about your scramble proposal. I don’t think I’ve ever had anything to do with sac_scale though. I don’t know why I would have. If you have a link to where I praised it though I’d be interested to read my comments. Not like someone opinion can’t change, but I don’t think that was ever my opinion.
I don’t disagree with that. Of course they aren’t orthogonal, but they do complement and compete with each other to some degree and it’s mostly the same crowd involved in both. As a side to that, I’ve found your comments in the various discussions to be interesting and I think you make some good points. Same goes for Erutan. There could probably be a really good tagging scheme for trails based on both your ideas if you put the time and effort into it.
Great resource! Covers all of SAC hiking and mountain hiking, very likely even touching a bit into demanding mountain hiking (The class 1 intermittent trail picture or the class 1 “bridge”.)
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Yes, I brought up North Cascades specifically, not the Cascade range as a whole. Mount Rainier is not in North Cascades, and Shasta (obviously) isn’t even in Washington state.
North Cascades National Park is renowned for its varied and rugged climbing terrain. Here you will find climbing routes of high quality and aesthetic appeal, guarded by remote, rugged access and weather volatility, resulting in mountaineering experiences of mental and physical challenge, solitude, and fulfillment.
The numerous peaks and over 300 glaciers present a variety of challenges and rewards: classic mixed mountaineering routes, intricate glacier travel, technical rock climbing and scrambling, all within a premier wilderness setting. Approach routes are often arduous, requiring strenuous crosscountry travel, sometimes for days or through thick slide alder, rocky avalanche shoots and scree slopes, icy creeks or rivers, steep snow, or traversing slopes in steep, slippery terrain.
Pot, meet kettle.
Getting back on topic.
If I remember my conversation with the former trails manager of SEKI properly, Class 1-3 are allowed in designated wilderness areas and Class 4/5 are reserved for frontcountry trails. The new Soda Springs trail in Tuolumne Meadows is in violation of that general rule, but it’s so overused I assume they got some waiver for that due to overuse impacts. I don’t recall these ratings aren’t generally conveyed to the public - SEKI has an interactive web map that lists these details, but I don’t think they’re listed on park guides etc, which seems like a bit of waste as they could be described in terms of “experience/challenge” in a way that would be digestible.
That document does a great job of showing multiple examples of terrain and explaining things in detail, and I’d say that it’s more useful than the current solutions of trail_visibility and sac_scale. I do feel like we’ll need more than 1-2 photo examples of different levels no matter what system is decided upon, as there are just a lot of different ways that terrain within a value can exist. It’s probably a little verbose/long, but is a good case where having more text makes things clearer vs trying to fit everything into a short sentence.
That said, I am wary of combining visibility and obstacles / difficulty into a single rating - for formal trails it makes sense because an agency can control all aspects of a trail to create a certain experience (given sufficient funding).
There’s a significant amount of trails on OSM that aren’t formal. operator=none would clearly indicate that the system is being used for non managed trails, but then you can’t guarantee that something with the visibility of Class 3 won’t have occasional Class 1 obstacles.
Also having written up guides for a number of off-trail alpine passes that generally range from YDS 2-3 / SAC T2-4 terrain and answered questions on them, I can say there are a lot of people that are comfortable with obstacles that require use of hands for balance, but not simple climbing (even if it is unexposed). I don’t think it’s appropriate to get into 3+ levels of “climbing” on base difficulty but I think something like the following levels should exist (wording is placeholder), maybe not as highway types but as path:difficulty=* or something.
Four basic levels of difficulty that’d make sense to me if we go for an overall rating that then maps to regional ones (I had started on this idea in the link above). Very rough draft here, but it seems like these would cover major break points in terms of experience, comfort, and technique.
- 1 - path / simple-path NFS 4-5, SAC T1, YDS 1. some lower (there are plenty of low to moderate visibility trails over easy smooth terrain). anyone in moderately good health that is able should be able to traverse the terrain.
- 1.5 - uneven path NFS 3?, SAC T2, YDS 2 the above, with obstacles below knee height (some rocks in the trail, roots, etc) that can cause issues for people with mobility or balance issues. this could be a subset of the above, and that would make sense to me - these trails often exist alongside them and aren’t really marked any differently. if we want to get fancy, having a smoothness key that isn’t solely for vehicles would allow for the distinction between T1-T2 / rough YDS 1 while still keeping it to the same parent category.
- 2 - demading-path NFS 1-2, SAC T3, YDS 2. where hands have to be used for balance, maybe an occasional mantle or drop but no real “climbing” required. trails with ladders or other simple aids would fall into this category. requires more body strength and while trivial for most people, can be impassible to certain groups of people and inexperienced hikers may find it uncomfortable. many trails in Needles & Acada fall into this category for formal NPS stuff.
- 3 - scrambling NFS 1 / informal, SAC T4+, YDS 3. you have to use your hands to climb up / go over obstacles, but the terrain isn’t difficult/technical enough for the majority of people to want to be roped or use any aid gear. while the majority of people are probably capable of this, many unexperienced people will be uncomfortable doing it and some previous experience is highly recommended.
Anything above scrambling can be put into climbing. If we do go the highway route (which will have a lot of pushback) it’d be simple to then break down scrambling into more granular detail (ala SAC, British scrambling system, etc) without cluttering the overall 4 tiers of rated terrain.
Some AllTrails comments for what I’d consider NFS 3 / T2 terrain on a 2.5 mile loop with less than 300 feet of low grade elevation gain change:
Little Cranberry Lake Inner Loop, Washington - 288 Reviews, Map | AllTrails “This trail is NOT easy. There are many tree roots and sharp rocks on the trail with barely any sections that are even and easy. Wear good boots and if you’re a beginner (like me)… do NOT go alone. The scenery IS beautiful…”
Little Cranberry Lake and Trail 100 Loop, Washington - 394 Reviews, Map | AllTrails “Not an easy hike, probably moderate. Trails nearest lake are rocky. Trail through forest easier. Beautiful hike.” and “Rated as an easy hike. I would say it’s near moderate due to roots and rocky terrain. Experienced hikers will breeze through it, but novice hikers beware of your footing. You may take an involuntary bath in Cranberry Lake.”
This shows a clear “casual hiker” appetite for some way of showing that while a hike is “easy” from say a physical fitness / endurance standpoint (ala the much earlier Sierra Club system) that isn’t how people solely view difficulty.
The NFS trail development classification for C3 “Obstacles may be common, but not substantial or intended to provide challenge” would probably map to 1.5 / uneven ground, but there are also plenty of Class 1-3 trails that happen to pass through terrain without natural obstacles, regardless of development. Class 1-2 obstacle wording would probably put it into 2 demanding / 3 scrambling territory, but there’s no way of knowing which, and many examples show obstacle less terrain that is just undeveloped or infrequently maintained.
I honestly had never thought too much about the the T1/T2 level distinction until recently, but it has some significant merit.
It isn’t that unusual for NFS/NPS trails sometimes enter T3 terrain, and while they tend not to have “full” T4 terrain there can be mantles & drops that are more than just “using your hands for balance” T3, or fatal exposure on simpler terrain. Regionally in the US there are a number of trails that are legitimate T4+ from government land managers - someone on the east coast (hardly alpine terrain lol) was sharing some examples of them in the slack trails working group a while back.
I find “mountain hiking” terrain in the desert pretty regularly, and while I (typo edit) don’t agree that the word alpine can’t be used because it only exists in the alps I don’t think that values should have a specific biome associated with them.
I think the tread & traffic flow from the NFS Trail Matrix is very useful, and the trail construction could be cribbed as well. If we do end up deprecating the current trail_visibility having something where NFS 4-5 is excellent (which is along the lines of what @Hungerburg has been advocating for elsewhere) would make sense. Good would be NFS 3, then from there have 2 more levels, loosely based around NFS 1 & 2. I do like how @Adam_Franco included the obviousness of gaps or crossings in the trail in relation to tread & traffic flow.
I think having only NFS 1 trails be non-continuous isn’t quite intuitive, I assume that makes allowances for minor gaps that are marked/signed, ala “some portion of the trail or marker is always visible” for 2 and probably 3.
The signage breakdown is interesting to me, and it’s interesting to see the breakdown between trails that have informational signage and which don’t which maps to what I’ve observed and thought about (someone was complaining on a trail that there weren’t signs pointing out peaks, I replied that they wouldn’t feel appropriate for that trail but didn’t have a formal system to think about). That would be extremely US specific, and of that federally maintained trails.
The current system is something like excellent = NFS 3-5, good = NFS 2, intermediate, bad, horrible, and no are all NFS 1. That feels really lopsided.
I feel like a universal “difficulty” that maps to localized systems might be a better goal than trying to do so for trails. People move over terrain in the way people move over terrain - what types of constructed paths exist and how people perceive them seems much more of a subjective experience, so perhaps I’d just be talking about a us_trail_vis here.
It felt a bit like banging my head against a wall for nobody here noticing for so long. Trodden comes from Tread?
No, it is not: Here in the Eastern Alps themselves trails with graded gravel surface and informational boards exist just the same. These are created by tourism agencies in collaboration with the communes/municipalities to appeal to a hearted public as leisurely pastime that is casually called hiking 
Look at the sample routes in the original SAC document to learn, that it is not wrong to tag such NFS 4-5 paths with T1 sac_scale=hiking, instead, it is spot on.
Then there are the trails by the mountain clubs: They appreciate less construction, NFS 1-3, to not disturb the natural surroundings. The paths either are in public space or allowed from easements. Maintenance work is almost exclusively done by volunteers.
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However much I like this NFS scheme, we should prepare for opposition:
- trailtype reminds a lot of tracktype
- it even has five numeric values
It is still much better than trail_visibility, because it is concerned with what is on the ground more than how that is perceived by some mapper.
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Wikipedia article for Mount Rainier "Mount Rainier also known as Tahoma, is a large active Stratovolcano in the Cascade Range of the Pacific Northwest in the United States. I could super less if it’s not technically a part of the North Cascade or whatever. It’s still in the Northern Cascade range and it’s a place people associate with mountain climbing. So your just being super pedantic. But sure dude, it’s not in the Northern Cascade. Whatever. Mountaineer still isn’t is a well developed, wide spread sport in the United States. So good for you that you me on a biennial technically about in the exact coordinates where I said it was. Your still wrong about mountaineering being popular
There’s a big difference between me using an example of a mountain to help clarify my point even if it’s not 100% exactly comparable to the situation you brought up versus SomeoneOne Else or Ezekielf making a random, irrelevant comment just so they can get a grade school level dunk on me and some cheap laughs while doing it.
I made a similar point in the trail vis thread - the current implementation is that excellent basically means it’s contiguous, good that you can see it the entire time, and the other four ratings are basically just incredibly vague descriptions of how much of the trail doesn’t have any path at all. It’s dumb, and I think retrofitting it a little is better than the status quo, but I think making something actually sensible would be a better pursuit.
I didn’t mean that such divisions or patterns wouldn’t or couldn’t exist anywhere else, just that they can’t be relied upon as a type of global standard. That wasn’t the intent behind them, but it’s worth noting.
If we tag a trail, say, in Chile, Japan, or Egpyt as NFS=3 based on visibility there’s no expectation that it would match other aspects like signage or typical environs etc.
I’ve encountered Class 3 trails in wilderness that are wider than double width due to high usage, flooding of ruts, being in a sandy stream bed, etc. The NFS ratings are guidelines that the national forest service aims for when creating trails, but are probably a little too specific in places.
NFS Class 4 and 5 trails are rare enough to the point where having them be 2 out of 5 ratings is probably almost as weird as having half of sac_scale be some form of climbing that is applied to all trails. There’s probably 8 miles max (Lower Yosemite Falls, Mist Trail & JMT south of Nevada Falls, Soda Springs, the 2 minute walk to Bridalveil falls, etc) out of the nearly 800 miles of trail in Yosemite that fall into those two values. The vast majority of the park is Class 2 & 3, with very few trails around the fringes at Class 1. It’d make sense for the basis of a US based trail visibility/quality, and that could also apply to other places (but obviously may not).
Associating Shasta with the North Cascades is more than a “biennial technically about in the exact coordinates” mistake. You made two two misleading snarky examples, so yeah I’ll be pedantic about the quality your counterarguments.
If you don’t want to be treated like a troll, stop acting like one. Take a step back and think about why you feel like everyone is out to get “cheap laughs” at your expense. You’re capable of making good points, but “there’s lots of ways to get easy dunks on other people’s comments if that’s what you’re into and don’t have an actual point to make” seems like a pretty accurate assessment of the majority of your behavior.
At this point it’s probably worth taking a few steps back and look back at the big picture.
- Does a global system for trail visibility make sense?
- Does a global system for trail difficulty/technique make sense (with mappings to localized systems)?
- Should trail visibility and difficulty be merged into the same rating (ala NFS development classes)?
At this point I’d personally say:
- Probably no
- Yes
- No
Where do others stand?
The vast majority of trail rating systems I’ve found take terrain type into account - perhaps “technique” or something is more accurate than difficulty (I think of YDS as ‘modes of movement’ but that doesn’t roll off the tongue). Something like the traditional Sierra Club rating system that just takes into account distance and elevation gain is a test of fitness, but that information can be easily gleaned via programmatic metadata at this point.
The people complaining that a ~2.5mi road trip hike with less than 300 feet of gain should be “moderate” rather than “easy” weren’t confused by the length and elevation gain as derived from the ways.
I won’t to get in an argument about it, but I’ve lived and hiked around the Cascade Range most of my life and at least in my experience people just say what mountain their going hiking at. No is like “I’m going to so and so mountain in the northern part of the third quadrant of Southern Middle Cascade Range” or whatever. They just say they are hiking at Mt. Shasta or Mt. Reiner. Not to mention this is a formal conversation internet. Not a court rail. So I don’t really care if someone sitting in their couch on the east coast thinks me using Mt. Reiner to help clarify my point snarky or misleading. Sorry, but I don’t need to be educated by someone who doesn’t even live here about the locations of mountains I’ve spent my whole life hiking
I said two people were out to get “cheap laughs”** at my expense **because that’s what they were doing. Two people isn’t everyone and there’s nothing trolling about me having an opinion. That said, it is trolling to act like someone is lying just because of a book title. Especially when the book doesn’t even have anything to do with mountaineering in Washington to begin with. I don’t see you caring though. So you’ll have to forgive me if I don’t think your concern about it is genuine.
I don’t see how that’s the case since 've backed most (if not everything) I’ve said up with citations, statistics, specific examples, mostly kept what I’m talking to areas where I’ve hiked and lived most of my life, Etc. Etc. Like with the cascade thing I’ve lived in the area my whole and hike it pretty regularly. When I was talking about hiking deaths I backed up what I was saying with a scientific study and cited the numbers from said study.
I don’t see anyone else doing any of that. No ones citing any evidence what-so-ever that the trail_visiblity tag saves lives. Someone Else brought up South Lake Tahoe to try and educate me on hiking in California when he lives in the United Kingdom and I take camping trips there every other year. He’s not getting scrutinized or called out the way I’m though. No one is.
In the meantime, I don’t think it’s an easy dunk or trolling to say things that are backed up with research papers, evidence based statistics, and personal experiences of places I’ve lived my whole life. Maybe that’s just me though man_shrugging: Dudes lecturing me about what to call a mountain range I’m literally standing on right now while he’s sitting around on his couch in the other side of the country and I’m the one trolling? Right.
So I looked at what pictures commons.wikimedia.org has on show for the North Cascade, and it confirmed my bias, the Alps are just the same what is there in the Americas, but on a smaller scale. Certainly, the Himalayan trumps it all.
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That was a typo, left out a “don’t” heh. It should have been “and while I don’t agree that the word alpine can’t be used because it only exists in the alps I don’t think that values should have a specific biome associated with them.”.
And yes, the Himalaya’s are the clearest evidence that the Alps aren’t even the “most alpine” range.
Nah, it is not the number of miles, it is the number of people who can or can’t use a trail. I wager to say, numbers are not proportional. On this, I guess, I am the utilitarian that cares for a useful map.
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I think that’s a useful stance, but I’m not sure what person could do NFS Class 5 trail but not Class 4. If Class 5 was paved then it could be wheelchair users, but Class 5 doesn’t have that guaranteed (and that’d be covered by surface anyways). Of the photo examples for obstacles and tread for Class 4, most of them look the same as Class 5, though some of them are in noticeably poorer condition.
The heaviness of construction and large interpretive signs seem as or more important than the actual trail condition (which makes sense from a management standpoint). Having keys that focus solely on visibility or technique / trail mobility seem like they’d do a better job than one that combines 4-5 different aspects. If we’re not interested about the visual weight of construction or the typical quality of signage, having a value that just includes the top of NFS 4 and all of 5 seems like it’d be more useful in terms of access and ability to use the trail.
The difference between “commonly hardened” and “often hardened”, “obstacles may be substantial and challenging” vs “obstacles are often substantial and challenging” is somewhat useful but probably doesn’t change someone being able to do a trail. The latter also begs the question challenging for who? For an elderly tourist or for an experienced fit hiker?
That sense of ‘who can and can’t use a trail’ is why I’m still for a 3-5 scale ‘technique difficulty’ key - just saying ‘non challenging obstacles’ vs ‘challenging obstacles’ isn’t as useful as the path, path (uneven), demanding path, and scramble distinctions IMO. Adding https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:wheelchair on top of a way with excellent visibility and a non-demanding path seems like it would indicate a NFS 5 quality path.
I’ve come to appreciate SAC more as I’ve gotten familiar with it - collapsing T4-T6 into one rating for simplicities sake makes sense for the basis of a general hiking/trail scale. There’s been too much attention to T5/T6 imo. T1 to T4 map well to the US if you ignore the “mountain hiking” wording:
Desert terrain in the southwest (including trails in national parks) have a pretty wide mix of T1 to T4 terrain, let alone the many mountain ranges in the country. Lots of boulders to climb over, slickrock ridges to gain and drop, some ladders etc.
A casual trail system around a near a forested sea level lake (Cranberry Lake near Anacortes WA with the AllTrail quotes above) has a mix of T1 and T2 terrain, and multiple casual hikers feel like that distinction is important. I was originally for collapsing T1 & T2, but I feel like that distinction is important.
One major thing that falls between the cracks (of both YDS & SAC) are short drops and mantles, which are more than just using your hands for balance, but are very different from exposed climbing. These tend to get sandbagged to YDS 2 / SAC T3 by experienced people, and pushed up to YDS 3 / SAC T4 by inexperienced ones. Putting that into the intermediate “demanding path” tier would seem to make sense to me in terms of setting expectations, and having more friendly descriptive names rather than numbers will help with common adoption.
I suppose there’s a larger question of whether to rely on putting multiple keys together (path and smoothness, path and wheelchair, etc) or creating more values in a key. The former feels “more OSM”, but the latter would be more understandable at a quick read. A casual person trying to add information probably isn’t going to want to read 3-5 wiki pages instead of the one they’re interested in.
Consider the following not unusual example - there’s a faint path going through a meadow or gentle grassy hillside.
Is it NFS 1-2 due to visibility, NFS 5 because it doesn’t have any obstacles in it, or NFS 4 because it has a nearly even surface with few irregularities? It’s not like every minimally developed trail is going to have obstacles placed into it - no heavy machinery is going to drop talus into grassy terrain to create “challenging substantial obstacles”. It just indicates that obstacles that exist in the terrain wouldn’t be removed like they would in more developed ones, not that they exist.
As a management plan it makes sense, and you can make inferences from it, but it doesn’t actually reflect what a particular path is.
Usual warning about the Forest Service classification system: although the system may be clear, the actual ratings as applied are not. I’ve found places where a trail crosses from one forest to another, and the rating is rarely the same on both sides of the border. The difference is usually just one class, but there are a couple of trails that run along borders, and are rated class 3 by one forest and class 1 by the other, despite referring to the exact same trail.
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That’s another good point, as well as considering the variance between levels and “may exist” or “probably exists” of different aspects. Some NFS 1 trails in SEKI get enough foot traffic they’re pretty followable, others (upper Wallace creek) look like a NFS 3 trail for a mile or so and then basically disappear for the next mile or two aside from brief periods of a hundred feet here or there. Heck the trail up to Dragon Lake which is abandoned (NFS 0?) is basically NFS 2/3 once you get above the initial granite at the bottom of it.
I think it’s useful meta-data, but I agree that it doesn’t answer the desire for knowledge of:
- how visible a trail is, e.g. ease of following / likelihood of getting lost on it
- presence of obstacles / uneven footing, for people with a lack of experience (or carrying heavy packs), that are older, have mobility issues, etc
2 is increasingly how I’m seeing “difficulty” and why despite YDS not being used on trails it came to mind when thinking of mapping various international systems. Most map clients can tell someone the distance and (rough, depending on how you smooth it, etc, caveat) elevation gain between two points on a trail, so that aspect of “difficulty” seems less useful (and honestly more subjective) than just describing aspects of the terrain and how people move over it.
update: at the bottom of this page is an interesting system, the German (Bergsteiger Magazine) system, which consists of four different axis:
- Endurance. (elevation gain, length)
- Power. (obstacles and technique)
- Psyche. (exposure)
- Orientation (trail_visibility)
Organizing them by the attributes one needs vs the actual thing itself is an interesting take, and not one I really agree with (power could just as easily and probably more accurately be technique), but it makes sense to me. Breaking things down gets you around those cases where a path fits into multiple categories (and one doesn’t know which attribute was chosen to the detriment of others).
Endurance is basically covered by modern mapping technology that can spit out total distance and approximate elevation between two points on a way.
Power is the difficulty/mobility/technique issue that I’m taking a stab at.
Psyche… I don’t think OSM requires an exposure rating system for paths honestly. It’d be pretty niche, but as I’m typing this I’m thinking of some formal NPS trails that require psyche. Hmm. Maybe later.
Orientation I think due to differing local norms this is best done by regional tags. Perhaps they use the same basic values, but can describe them differently? Say there’s always an excellent, good, poor, bad or whatever but what constitutes those can vary by region?