You know what can really mess up carefully laid plans? What can even lead to a dangerous situation? When you get to the crossing of the South Fork Trinity River Trail and the East Fork South Fork Trinity River, a waterway that very much is still a river, and that bridge that someone has assured you they know is there is not there. There’s not even the evidence of once having footings for a bridge.

Apparently the mapper knew based on Bing aerial photography. Through thick trees. I can make guesses about how that crossing goes, too. At least when I guess wrong, I know it was a guess and might have made contingency plans around it.

Fortunately in the early days of Autumn, that ford I was LIED to about is just 4m of knee high wading without much current. That river comes out of some mountains that collect snow. It isn’t always so low.

The thing is, if it is important, it HAS to be correct. Your guess isn’t good enough. If it isn’t important, it can be left until someone who knows feels like doing it. There’s no renderer having trouble deciding how to render this crossing. It’s quite common that they aren’t specified.

I’ve been coming across a lot of guesses lately. I know they are guesses because they are wrong.

I was looking over an area I’d been working on when something started feeling wrong. It took me a couple minutes to notice that one of the roads I had aligned recently had sprouted four bridges. What? It was the unimportant spur of an unimportant low standard Forest Service road. They also get referred to as “unimproved” roads. We’re talking a road that might be produced simply by running a blade across the dirt. The whole thing probably cost a fraction of the cost of a bridge and suddenly it had four. Based on Bing imagery again, in which you can clearly see it is just a dirt road.

… See full entry

About a year ago, I actually encountered a use of highway=road as I aligned roads and added a bit more detail to the area at the south end of Mendocino National Forest. And what is a “road”? A placeholder! “Undefined” is actually quite defined comparatively. I investigated what it should be a placeholder for and found it was marking an ATV trail. It had been there a few years and could survive a few more.

Since JOSM doesn’t even seem to know one might want to set a value called “atv”, perhaps I should explain. Also called a “quad”, these narrow little four wheeled things can’t quite go everywhere a motorcycle can go, but they’ll get a lot more places than a 4x4 vehicle. There were 3 wheeled ones (probably still are in other places) but they were banned because they killed people more often due to rolling more easily. People grumbled at first. Three wheels is more fun! But they seem happy now. It hurts to roll over. Often tagging goes a little like this:

highway=[um]
atv=yes/designated
motorcar=no
maxwidth=1.27

(No side-by-sides, as the signs in Colorado often said! Those are often known as ATV or UTV.)

But is [um] a path or a track?

Well, the wiki on “path” is quite clear: “A highway=path is not for use by four-wheeled (two-track) vehicles.” Then it muddles a little: “A path-like way where four-wheeled vehicles are allowed, is likely better tagged as a highway=track or highway=service.” Only “likely”.

Meanwhile, on the wiki on “track” we find that track is “generally not appropriate” for “A trail or path that is not wide enough for a typical four-wheeled motor vehicle.” There is a footnote to clarify this: “A “typical four-wheeled motor vehicle” means a general purpose or average motor vehicle commonly used in a given region. The size and capability of what is considered a typical, common, or average vehicle varies around the world.”

… See full entry

I have been deeply tempted to use this. There have been times when I didn’t even tag the disposal not because it slipped my mind, but because “pitlatrine” is wrong.

From the wiki for toilets:disposal=pitlatrine, “waste falls into a lined or unlined pit”. This is a lie. A pit is an unlined hole in the ground. A pit toilet uses an unlined hole in the ground. A lined hole in the ground is a vault and the difference is important to land managers and, I would argue, the end user.

As to land managers, one example would be the United States Forest Service. If an area has over a certain number of visitors a year, they try to supply a toilet facility. If that number is still few enough, a (unlined) pit toilet is sufficient. Over a certain amount, it needs to be a vault. This is due to the waste leaching into the surrounding soil with an unlined system. With sufficient volume, it’s more likely to cause contamination in the area.

When a pit toilet is full, the land manager digs a new hole, moves over whatever construction they’ve got in place to help you stay above ground while you make your deposit, and cover over the old hole. When a vault toilet is full, someone comes to pump that thing out and it stays just where it was before.

For the end user, well, the stories I could tell you about using a pit toilet. The floor of the one in Little Round Valley sagged as I stepped into it. Volunteers had just finished digging the hole and moving the little building over it at Santa Cruz Guard Station as I arrived. Practically smell free throughout the stay! Most of the rest of the backcountry pit toilets in the area don’t actually have full buildings, just 0-3 privacy walls around a topped hole. When not spacious by not having a complete set of walls, they tend to be exceedingly tight. The building of one near Blue Lakes was so tight, it was hard to stand to pull up my pants without opening the door.

… See full entry

Ever since visiting Mount Lassic and then making edits in the region, I’ve had this nagging difficulty: What to do with a mountain whose high point is named differently? Mount Lassic has three peaks, the highest is called Signal Peak. I eventually mapped its survey point, which is also called Mount Lassic, and hoped that was done. (Apparently I shouldn’t map survey points except at the exact point indicated, so I’ve done this WRONG. I’ll just name a peak “Such-and-such Benchmark” then. Except a benchmark is specifically a vertical control and most at peaks are horizontal controls. “Such-and-such Triangulation Station” gets a bit long. Oh, the humanity!) Unfortunately, if one searches for the mountain, one only gets the Mount Lassic Wilderness and the Mount Lassic Trail, but there’s no hint that this goes to the high point of Mount Lassic. It goes, in fact, to “Signal Peak”.

Other places where there’s a named high point (peak) different from the main mountain are Marble Mountain (with Black Marble Mountain the high point). Someone seems to have simply marked a lower peak as Marble Mountain. If one does this, there’s a bit of a debate if it is the highest white peak or the most prominent white peak. Mount Konocti with high point Wright Peak. Currently both are marked close to the high point, but the main mountain has been given a lower elevation so doesn’t show often, but it is searchable.

… See full entry

In the past, as I’ve traveled, I’ve found it pretty easy to find a library when I need one. I have offline maps from OpenAndroMaps that I use with OruxMaps. I open it to my search area and ask it where the libraries are and it gives me a few. Suddenly this is failing. Perhaps it was already failing and I wasn’t finding as many as are there.

The first failure was in Etna, California. OSM directed me to a parking lot with no library around it. Luckily, I had signal that worked and could find an address 1.5 blocks away. This mark got moved when I got home.

The second failure was in Ely, Nevada. This is the county seat. There is no way they don’t have a library. My map said no. Again, I had some signal and was able to find an address. It’s a big building next to the courthouse, well lit and full of books and has excellent internet. Now that I’ve located it on OSM, I found it was marked as a post office. There’s one post office in Ely and it’s off on the east edge of town. USPS doesn’t know about this one. It’s all better now. The White Pine County Library lives!

The third failure was in Hawthorne, Nevada. This was a lesser failure. When I was lazy and just searched for something with the word “library”, I got nothing. But when wandered through the menus to search the type, I got it. It just needed to be named. Now it is the Mineral County Library.

Before, I had suspected that someone had gone through and systematically added libraries. Maybe they have and just haven’t gotten to Nevada and northern California. In Utah, I was even able to find out about the tiny library in Bluff, housed in the old jail! It’s so small it was only open 2 days a week for a few hours. At that time, it was one of the only libraries that left the internet on while closed. (I’m glad a lot more do this now. Is there a tag for that?)

Anyway, libraries, very important mapping and there’s some still in need!

Once upon a time, I was asked why I had only marked the south end of a trail and not the north end.

Well, I said, I haven’t been there, so I don’t have a GPS track. All I have is that USGS line and the one thing I know about it is it’s wrong. As long as it isn’t mapped, someone will be more likely to put down the correct line when they do want to map it. They might not even notice it’s needed if a bad line is there.

Then I said I might come down on the side of mapping everything you can as best you can sometime later.

Well, it’s later. Now I say map it all! And put down the source as you do it. Not just in the changeset note, but actually on the segment. And it can be good to make a guess about trail_visibility. I have more tools now.

Strava heatmap is the best as an average of GPS signals, if you can get it. I have found what is probably the firefighter loop through nearby private lands and not actually available to the public as a hike on there. It looks like a nice loop out there in Kneeland where there’s no public hiking. Only the most popular trails have enough heat to be an average. A random spattering of others have some kind of clues.

I can download system trails from the Forest Service’s data clearinghouse. Most of these match the Forest Service Topo (another source), but some have updated. Some of them match the USGS lines. Okay, a lot. And apparently Six Rivers has no system trails at all. They are seriously slacking. (And now a section of their roads has vanished from the Interactive Visitor Map. What is wrong with you, Six Rivers?)

And there’s ever more imagery. Sometimes it’s just visible. All the other lines available helps to differentiate the actual bit of trail from random fallen trees that make a line on the ground. A ridge trail might have a fuel break competing with trail, so there are plenty of bad signals just looking at photos. Down the gully, that might be just water course. Or trail. Or both.

… See full entry

There must be another name for these. There has to be a tag for them. They’re so common!

But I see in highway=trailhead that a “trail register” is something you might want to tag exists at a trailhead. Yep. How? It doesn’t mention that.

Trying to dig about and find what others have decided on their own. I found some
tourism=information
information=route_marker
name=Trail Register
in New York. In another cluster of two are some
tourism=information
information=board
name=Trail Register
I’ve seen some in the Wind River Range in Wyoming that were built into the information board. I guess it could be an information board with a register. It’s not a route marker. In fact, the one I’m staring at at the moment is at the parking which is somewhat offset from the actual start of the trail. Look, it’s a ridge. There’s room here and the trail is over there. Deal.

In Connecticut, I’ve found a single
tourism=information
information=route_marker
trail_register=yes
so there’s some more support for calling it a route marker. It’s not! It sorta can be. But it’s not!

I’ve found a
tourism=information
information=trail_register
in southern California similarly in Iceland
information=trail_register
man_made=cairn
name=Arnarfellsbrekka
and, I mean, what? I guess maybe a named cairn could have a register. Certainly cairns and peak registers go together. Those are usually a little less official than the registers at trailheads.

I have to admit, this simpler one seems best. I see why people are attracted to putting this down as tourism=information since the comments people leave are often the best source for information about the trail conditions you are about to experience. I may have accidentally weighted my search for this tag, though. Not all of it, but the later of it.

So one can do user defined values for information=, one does not have to choose from the small selection in the wiki. I’m going with…

tourism=information
information=trail_register

… See full entry

Making plans, so checking on the many sources for good hikes in an area. First, because it’s Six Rivers National Forest (mainly), I glance over the Forest Service topographic maps. There’s not a lot of trails showing on there in the area, but there’s three heading up to a selection of lookouts. There’s also a bunch of quarter mile spurs. Why? What sense do these make?

I check the USGS, but these are generally older and the information was supplied by the Forest Service anyway.

For the basic well known things, check AllTrails. It says you can cross country up Black Lassic. (I knew that already.) A community content tab appeared a few years back and you can find some good things here sometimes, but it’s always buried in a load of strange. There’s a bunch of strange in this area. Strange strange. Usually there’s a lot of long bike rides, but not here. Someone has apparently hiked the river underneath the reservoir. That’s fancy.

Hiking Project will often have a different set of trails. Actually, I find this a much more useable app for finding trails. Some of that is because even the free version will let you easily have the whole state downloaded. (It’s funding by outdoor venders and if they encourage you to wear out your gear, you’ll buy more gear.) Unfortunately it only has the nearby National Recreation Trail I already know about.

… See full entry

amenity=hitching_post
Short and easy, 214 uses.

tourism=trail_riding_rest
Well, it may contain one or more hitching posts. 1 use. That’ll be the person who wrote it up for the wiki and linked it about for good visibility. Ooh, and it’s rendered on the trail riding map. Perhaps it was made because other resting places are possible, so this becomes a unifying tag to look for if you are looking for a place to rest your horse? Much like a tourism=trail_riding_station seems to be a unifying tag to put on all the different things you can overnight your horse in? (1339 uses for that one, it’s doing a better job. Oh, except that I looked at how it was actually being used and some of it was for staging locations where overnighting would be illegal. So not all correct uses. And I can definitely see where the confusion comes from.) Although if these things are meant to be a unifying device, used in addition to the more specific tags, it probably ought to say that on the wiki page. Is that even how tags are meant to be used? I certainly see the utility.

amenity=animal_hitch
animal_hitch=ring/rail/post
horse=yes
er…
mule=yes
donkey=yes
llama=yes
Perhaps you should just be assuming your zebra/donkey cross or whatever other exotic bit of stock you’ve got =yes? Except if you’re in big horn sheep country, it very well might be that goat=no.
104 uses for all animals, but it isn’t popular enough to get combination details. For the type tag, there are 83 rings and 7 rails, but no posts at all. Nope, the people don’t want it for hitching posts. Well, except for the sorts who get particular about the post being horizontal between two other posts, AKA a rail. Or particular about there being a ring on the post, but the example dog_hitch (not kidding) is also a ring.
Oh, there’s also 2 uses of amenity=horse_hitch.

… See full entry

Just looking it up as a corral only found this one person asking how to, but they are actually describing an arena. When I was a camp counselor for a summer and generally did the horse units, there was one advanced unit that did an overnight ride. We rode to a place with an arena and made do with that to keep the horses overnight. It doesn’t have the watering and feeding station common to these, but plenty of room to keep nearly 3 dozen horses from running off, including the one that would untie any knot no matter how complicated.

It can’t be just a western US thing. You find them all over on Forest Service maps as a little dotted square with “corral” written next to them. They’re on USGS too. The #1 answer on the question refers to this Riding page on the wiki, but then gets the wrong answer for this or a corral. It might match another sort of corral, maybe.

A “corral” is a temporary space for keeping stock animals. They really come in two types although they are marked the same on the USFS and USGS maps. The type that’s most important to me to map is usually smaller, just a fenced box with a gate on one side. There’s usually a trough for water and a bit of wire to hold a bit of alfalfa. Sometimes there’s a spigot. (It’s a good idea to assume these are non-potable water.) The second type is for collecting herded animals, such as cows or sheep. These are usually larger and more elaborate, having a long arm of fencing that funnels the animals into the enclosure. There is often a ramp for loading the animals into a truck. This second is probably known to those who need to know it and the general public would only be looking up “what is that?”, but the first is an amenity that someone might be searching for.

Part of the answer

… See full entry

I expect this is only a problem in those places that have wild camping allowed as the norm. Bureau of Land Management and Forest Service lands fall into this category and cover a lot of the western United States and a little of the eastern ones. I’ve failed at finding an answer via search engine. There could be something on the wiki for the tourism=camp_site tag, but it’s not there now.

For me, this question has come up specifically in mapping backcountry (hiking) areas where camping is generally allowed wherever a person might want to settle for the night, but there is often a lake where camping has been banned outright. This is more than the usual banning of camping within 100 feet of water that is often found in Congressionally designated Wilderness areas. This is for singled out areas.

Some examples:

Sheep Lake in West Elk Wilderness. (38.7534N, 107.2366W – See rule 6 here.) No camping within ¼ mile.

Gilpin Lake, Gold Creek Lake, and Three Island Lake in Mount Zirkel Wilderness. (40.7825N, 106.6793W – See here.) No camping within ¼ mile.

Shadow Lake in Ansel Adams Wilderness. (37.6946N, 119.1243W – See here.) No camping at the lake or between the trail and creek.

Thousand Island Lake in Ansel Adams Wilderness. (37.7202N, 119.1796W – Same link.) No camping within ¼ mile of the outlet.

Lower Golden Trout Lake in John Muir Wilderness. (37.2410N, 118.7207W – Same link.) No camping within 500 feet of the lake.

Crystal Lake in Hoover Wilderness. (38.0003N, 119.2454W – Same link.) No camping at lake. There’s quite a few more at this link, but this covers all the wildernesses represented.

Geneva Lake (and many more) in Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness. (39.0969N, 107.0775W – See here.) Camping in designated (numbered) sites only. Sites have been marked at Geneva Lake, but not at Capitol Lake, for instance. Included to show a less restrictive case.

… See full entry

Well, I finally got around to trying to undelete the bit of trail in Redwood National Park between Tall Trees and Emerald Ridge, which didn’t take long because I’d already done the hard bit of finding which way that was by finding the deletion changeset. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of things in this area that nag at me. For instance, while I was (not) discovering if there was any reason the trail was deleted, I sorted out the nag about getting the seasonal bridges correctly tags for that attribute. Maybe. It could be “seasonal=summer/autumn” (used on the bridges) or “seasonal=dry_season” used on the trail. Does dry season start when the rains end or when the creek starts to get low too? Because that creek stays high into the dry, making summer/autumn possibly more accurate. Dry/wet season also can require some lookup. If I saw something was “wet_season” in the southwest US deserts, a few years ago I’d expect that means winter, but now I know it might actually mean July and August, when the monsoonal moisture comes through, but when the southwest US coast I grew up on has average monthly rainfall of 0.04 inches.

… See full entry

I tend to wonder a bit about this community we supposedly have. In about 6 years of edits, but only about 200 edits, I had one single interaction with community and it’s still bugging me 2 years later.

You see, this character wandered over to my changeset and commented that they had removed a trail because it “might be misleading” and they couldn’t find it on their USGS map.

Which is cute considering the USGS for the area doesn’t date back to 1995 like much of them. It dates back to 1960. You can’t find the Redwood National Park on most of it, much less any of the trails the park has made. You find the logging roads the park has actively and successfully decommissioned. The one thing you can be sure about USGS for this area is that it is wrong. Heck, I hiked on a combination of Forest Service and USGS maps all over the west for a couple years and I’ve gotten to a point that if I see these two sources agreeing, I am certain I’ll run into something very different on the ground. It’s better than a coin flip. So it’s not even uncommon that USGS is wrong. It’s just particularly wrong in this area. And it should be obvious.

But it wasn’t to this new then mapper. So they submitted this changeset to “exclude a non-existing trail”.

It’s an official trail! It literally has signs at both ends pointing it out! When you get a permit to backpack here, they send you a map that includes this trail! Yes, with all those fords that have been left swimming there in the creek. I painstakingly got it onto that map using my GPS track from actually hiking this actual trail and imagery. That track bounced around a lot there under the big trees making it quite an effort. I want this trail back.

So that bit of community didn’t leave a good taste.

… See full entry

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.

… See full entry

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.

… See full entry

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.

… See full entry

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.

… See full entry

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.

… See full entry