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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Ah, the Ute Peak saga. My first hike in the area was almost, but not quite, up to the top of Ute Peak. Then I wandered up Darling Creek. Then I came at Ute Peak once more, but from a long way around. The trails connecting the two South Fork Trailhead were something I really wanted to know about, but FS and OSM were keeping quiet. The only thing in the area mapped on OSM was a strange alternate CDT route that vanished whenever I tried to zoom in. I hiked on the Forest Service quads. They had some strange ideas for Ute Peak, but not half as strange as I found when I got signal up high and got the USGS maps of the area.

Anyway, I started mapping by adding the Darling Creek trail up to Saint Louis Divide. This is one of the South Fork Trail’s trailheads, so I figured get it done first so South Fork can build on it. I also tried to get Saint Louis Divide on. There’s not a lot of trail to the trailhead on the east and it can be seen on satellite. There’s some really good game trails in the area, too. They can be the easiest trail of all to see in this area. I’m not mapping them, but did seem to get a little obsessed with mapping this area that is so undermapped. (Denver, what you up to? This is your backyard!)

Then I added Ute Peak. I did it via the Ute Peak Trail, but the more common route is from Ute Pass. USGS has a pair of lines that eventually get to Ute Peak somewhere entirely different from the actual junction. I used the Strava heat map background on Strava-iD to find the trail.

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Apparently someone was in the process of getting all kinds of trails down on Medicine Bow around the peak when my Wyoming map file was created. (OpenAndroMaps updates on a roughly quarterly basis.) There were a lot on my map and a bunch more once I started looking at what could be mapped from my excursions. I added some signs. The area is well signed. And I noticed that the main trail up the peak (the east side of Medicine Bow Peak Trail) was of the right shape, but the wrong location. That seemed odd, but the Strava heat map confirmed my line was in the correct place. There was a line one could imagine was trail under both lines. So I moved it. Maybe it was a USGS line? Maybe I should more carefully check the rest? It seemed alright on the first look.

There’s some amenities that could be added. A hand pump for water in a picnic area, for instance. But mostly things are looking good for the area.

I decided against trying to mark the old Circle Trail that I foolishly tried to hike. I’ve seen people mark all the stops on interpretive trails like Miners Cabin, but I decided against trying that.

In this area, the Encampment River isn’t even on the map! I didn’t do much to fix that… I did add the southern half of the Encampment River Trail, which happens to be the part I hiked. It’s more popular than not being on the map indicates and now it’s complete on the map.

Before Encampment, I hiked in the north portion of Mount Zirkel Wilderness. There were no trails here on OSM. There were a couple track roads. In the congressionally designated wilderness. Not on my watch! I actually hiked quite a lot of the trails here, and added a few more based on what can be seen and USGS. It seems to be fairly accurate in the area. I was able to adjust a lot of these to trail visible in satellite pictures.

I do have a difficulty here for the trail visibility. If you read my blog, you’ll find a theme. After the first 5.5 miles, I launched into two miles of the most obvious but difficult trail I’ve ever encountered. In the middle of the second day, I launched into another 2 mile section that was much the same. On the third day, I headed out into another 2 miles that was definitely going to be worse than the lower trail, defiant about if it would be. There was a bit that was the worst piece of trail for the whole trip, but it was a bit shorter.

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I hiked the Wind River Range out of Skyline, then out of Boulder Lake. Noted that Sacred Rim is an informal trail. Skyline is a very well used location and except for the lack of marked signs, it was well mapped. In fact, when I came to well used junctions, I usually had those on OSM even if they weren’t official. There wasn’t much of trail visibility or difficulty marked, but such is the usual state of things. Those unofficial trails should be marked informal, too, even if they aren’t rendered any differently. There were missing trailhead details. Not much to add here.

Incidentally, how would one mark a trail register? Corrals?

I actually looked for corrals and only found one person asking how to mark them, getting not much of a good answer, and the thing they were wanting to mark is actually an arena anyway. Corrals are temporary holding pens for life stock that are frequently found at trailheads in the western USA. Are they unique to the area? Both trailheads I hiked out of here in the Winds had them. These are specifically for horses and mules. I’ve also encountered a larger breed of these for rounding up cows and once one for rounding up sheep.

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First up was the Mirror Lake area. Someone had added Yellow Pine Trail since the creation of my Colorado-Utah download from OpenAndroMaps. That’s good, because I didn’t have a track for all of it. I added details at the Provo Falls turnout. I didn’t add that it’s a paid thing (via the Mirror Lake Recreation Pass thingy) as are most, but NOT ALL, parking areas in this area. This is something that can be added.

Lots of good stuff already here, but signs are mostly missing. Even at the western trailhead for the Uinta Highline there was no information sign marked. I like knowing there’s going to be a sign at the intersection coming up, but never realized it could be mapped until I saw it rendered. Added those. Added a bench on Whiskey Creek. Corrected some names around the Main Fork. Stillwater Trail is a different thing a little to the east and this is the Main Fork for sure. Says right there. Lots of little things.

Was pretty much little things for the area around Red Castle Lake and [up Kings Peak]https://valhikes.blogspot.com/2022/09/kings-kings-peak-painter-basin-and.html) and around to Henry’s Basin, but then there’s Big Meadows Trail. Er. What to say about a trail that looks like it has freshish blazes and no fresh cuts through the many trees on it? Well, it wasn’t in the right place outside the wilderness where I was quite sure I was on trail. I fixed it to my best guess before and after the wilderness sign.

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Not too much done here, but there is a real trail up Mount Pisgah. I made sure it was on the map. The roads around this could use some help. Sign indications are that BLM have a lollipop situation in the wilderness study area for the road to this trail, which is also not shown on OSM. There’s more to do than I did, it seems.

I didn’t do any edits for the Water Canyon area, although I probably should. I wish some of the little trails were mapped, but I didn’t hike these. I couldn’t find anything about trails in the area before getting there and there are some.

I didn’t do much in the Ruby Mountains either. The trails seemed pretty well mapped. Hennen Canyon was totally missing, though. I therefore added it. It officially went all the way to the top of Ruby Dome! Some sort of trail still does, but there are variations. In fact, there are variations on down the canyon.

The Forest Service shows the trail further from the creek on the way to Griswold Lake and the trail that is getting the most use has a spot that is not very trail like near the top. I took a route further from the creek and found it better, even if not well used, on the way down.

I sure wish standard OSM would render the trail visibility and difficulty. It’s not right that absolutely everything is a bunch of red dots. This trail is not for just anyone with some sneakers.

I also added some details around the Right Fork since the public doesn’t get to start hiking where the road ends. I marked the parking and trailhead and sign so now that’s clearer. Also marked trailhead parking within Thomas Canyon Campground for Thomas Canyon since, again, you can’t park right next to the trail.

This one should actually have got noted before Lassen. Gray Falls is not a very big area, but there were no trails and the picnic area and toilet were missing and the road heads off to the long gone bridge even though it doesn’t quite. I added in the trails as best I could along with the amenities.

I started off the latest bit of mapping with some edits in the Community Forest. The Arcata Ridge Trail is finally done! But the land manager didn’t go and put the new trail on the map. Land managers, why don’t you do this? There were some other little things to deal with.

Then I stepped back in time to the Lassen area, where I hiked a big loop with the PCT and Hat Creek. There’s a lovely and well used trail along Hat Creek, but it wasn’t mapped at all. It’s all better now. I connected the PCT to Hat Creek via a trail that is, as it turns out, only mostly there. The bottom is seeing driving traffic. (Illegal, this is not on the MVUM.) The top is without clue except for a gate in a fence maybe a quarter mile down. In between it becomes animal trail, then obvious enough until a jeep track. (Legal to drive, it is on the MVUM.) It vanished a moment again, but probably due to me going the wrong way. It was really clear lower down. So I added that in with appropriate visibility noted.

The other end I connected via the Subway Cave. I decided not to add the trail the Forest Service had claimed was there. There’s trail around the campground, but not to the cave, and there’s other ways to get there.

I also hiked some of Bizz Johnson. It was missing the (official) bypass trails for the tunnels. The Southside Trail was missing an overlook loop and a connector. It’s also missing a river access and a second route for another overlook, but I didn’t hike those and don’t know where to put them exactly. The other direction was missing trail under the highway. There’s a relation marking it across the highway and that isn’t really how it goes. That is how the old grade went (but there wasn’t a highway then).

In the past, I’ve only mapped the part of my large outings that specifically stood out as needing it when I got to the end. It means I haven’t mined the full potential of map updates possible based on my travels. However, after hiking the West Elk Wilderness, I was determined that I really should sort through every track and create improvements. New philosophy: The more I add, the more likely someone else will decide OSM is useful, except it needs some help here, and start adding too. Actually an old philosophy, but I’m trying to implement it more completely.

So what happened in West Elk?

I hike using a combination of maps. When I’m in a National Forest, I can use the georeferenced PDF files the Forest Service publishes. These are the new vector based national map (USGS) with FS data superimposed. They are supplied in 7.5” quadrants by the same names as the older USGS maps. I point OruxMaps at a folder of folders of all the maps for a degree square and it picks out the right one for the location I’m looking at and presents it. It’s a very nice system, but the quality of the data varies by forest and even by ranger district. Sometimes it’s a little off, sometimes a lot. It’s nice to have a second opinion. It’s also nice to have something that covers outside the forest. For that, I have Open Street Map, which I can take with me via the files at Open Andro Maps. These are supplied by state and I have all of them downloaded and try to update states I know I’ll visit before going. The accuracy of these varies by all sorts of things.

In West Elk, a number of trails are faint and the general nature of the FS to be only mostly in the right place became a problem. Additionally, there’s a few alternate routes that didn’t exist on the ground. OSM had everything that was real, even if faint, and was missing those trails that didn’t have so much as a cairn to mark them. It seemed to be right on.

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