Okay, the forum looks like a scary place. I’m not even sure which category it goes in.

The toilets wiki page does actually contain “toilets:disposal=tank - a storage tank emptied by a pumping truck. Often used for portable toilets.” Was that there a while? I certainly have missed it until now. Perhaps “tank” is better than “vault” although “vault” is the standard on BLM and FS pages. Probably NPS and many state parks too. Or perhaps “vault” is better as it is a buried tank. Perhaps tank is trying to not refer to a buried tank?

Current usage according to overpass: 24 tanks, 8 vaults.

Anyway, I shall approach it from the wiki talk page instead.

I have met a couple fiberglass installations, but almost all are the solid iron and concrete pieces from Spokane. Dates on them from a couple years ago or a couple decades, it’s all the same except for the number of coats of paint. I know one that’s survived a couple small debris flows. It might be a biffy, but it’s not a pitlatrine.

Okay, I’ll take it to the forum. Really I will. Thanks for the validation!

Mapnik has it’s support behind natural=massif as well. It renders. Not quite the way I would want, but if I zoom in far enough, it says Mount Lassic. Taginfo indicates Dianacht Topo uses it (area only), OpenTopoMap (area or way), and OsmAnd (all).

I saw in the discussion that got the wiki entry that it wasn’t linked to peak on purpose. Perhaps it would be okay after all. Hill is linked, and what good is that? Prominence is not although it is the better answer to the linked enhancement proposal. (The people saying it can just be calculated: PeakVisor says they recalculate for their ~1M peaks every time there’s a better elevation model and it takes a little over a day. All to save a tag?)

I like an area. It maintains itself as to included peaks. It is straightforward.

As to verifiability, it is verifiable that there’s a thing there that a user of map data might want to consider, it’s just the edges that are difficult. They also lack importance. A valley goes from ridge to ridge, but it is only the bottom of it that people want labeled or to consider as the valley. Sometimes “around here” is actually okay.

Looks like someone has dropped in a wiki page for https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural=massif stating that it is for this specific purpose. (Born November 2023.) The abandoned proposal indicates it’s more of a small range. The dictionary definition is a “compact cluster of mountains” but dictionaries can be rather imprecise with their language. My fuzzy feel for what a “massif” is suggests it might be applicable. It’s got 26 uses to natural=mountain’s 20 uses! The wiki editor has unilaterally (I’m being presumptuous) decided that it should only be applied to areas. Areas was all I was thinking until this first comment mentioning that they could be points. I have to admit, points maybe should be valid.

By the wiki, natural=peak should only be applied to points. In spite of the 115 ways this does seem the right and good way. Most of what I clicked on were indistinct bumps, often in parks. I’m willing to just shuffle these examples into the “wrong” category. Sticking a point in the middle would do as well. Better since it would be rendered.

One could decide that peak should just get extended, as this example shows with Wilderness Peak surrounded by Andrew Nyman Mountain, both natural=peak. This would preclude mapping a mountain/massif as a single point. Oh, dear, take it to the extreme and you don’t need mountain_range. Just draw ever bigger “peak” contours for each level of range. However, I would prefer not to conflate the concepts. Peak is a point where every direction is downhill. It can be as minor or major as you like.

@SK53 Those seem to generally be kludges to make things render. I’ve hit a few possible nails with the “locality” hammer, too. Hopefully they were applicable.

As I sit here shuffling thoughts around for the comment, I think I might just put some momentum behind the massif. It feels like it would have fewer problems with people trying to promote their peak just because it “feels more important”.

Because the fungus that kills Port Orford Cedars also affects tanoaks quite badly, the parks of the Midpeninsula Regional Parks (south of San Francisco, California) have provided boot scrapers at a number of their trailheads. Knocking the mud off prevents the spread and saves their tanoaks, or so they hope. These aren’t associated with any entrances, but they did all have information signs they would be right or left of. They weren’t quite as cool as these, either.

Arg. My markup never gets not rusty. Where’s the edit button for a comment? Delete?

A corral is a type of paddock, so tag it as such:
landuse=animal_keeping
animal_keeping:type=paddock
animal_keeping=horse;cow;sheep (delete or add as appropriate)

If it is for temporary accommodation for stock at a trailhead or campground or similar, add
tourism=trail_riding_station

I expect it’s a good idea to mark the fence. If a renderer doesn’t know what to do with the above, maybe it’ll still show a fence, which a human looking at it might still get the information that there’s a small fenced area for temporary stock holding.
barrier=fence

This has been in need of a final summary.

A corral is a type of paddock, so tag it as such: landuse=animal_keeping animal_keeping:type=paddock animal_keeping=horse;cow;sheep (delete or add as appropriate)

If it is for temporary accommodation for stock at a trailhead or campground or similar, add: tourism=trail_riding_station

I expect it’s a good idea to mark the fence. If a renderer doesn’t know what to do with the above, maybe it’ll still show a fence, which a human looking at it might still get the information that there’s a small fenced area for temporary stock holding. barrier=fence

An example at Lovers Camp Trailhead. Hopefully that’s not too much to hang on a few nodes.

@SomeoneElse Yeah, you’re supposed to tell someone when you should be back and where you’re going in between. Some people leaves detailed itineraries in an envelope in the car. (SNR mentioned you can even do a foil print of your shoes so they can track you when they chatted with our Girl Scout troop.) I’m not so good at doing that, so an entry without an out date in a trail register and an apparently abandoned car might be the last anyone ever knows of me.

Looks like information=route_marker has a few more uses. But a trail register as trail marker isn’t directional, so it would really only be information=trail_blaze. (It’s not just for blazed trees! Although pretty sure I’m one of the misusers of this in the past.)

Okay, I don’t like box. It doesn’t feel right.

amenity=animal_hitch
animal_hitch=corral
horse=yes

Yes. That feels right. One can think of a corral as a hitch? Right? Maybe it takes the abstract “horse parking” step in between to make it make sense. Baby steps. A hitch is a place to tether the animal. Which is to say, immobilize it within a small space. It’s just a looser tethering to have a small box of fencing with a gate on one side. Right?

I would expect to see camping=no on half the city parks if it was getting much use. (Keeping in mind it likely applies to most city parks.) The statistics I saw put it at a little over 1000. That’s minute compared to what it could be. It has not raised itself to “de-facto”. There’s actually more using the key “camp” than “camping”, usually with “yes”, but no one has documented that. (I would support camping over camp for this use. I don’t know what they are using it for.)

Currently, values with the camping key are mostly “no” (848) followed by “dispersed” (215) and “yes” (52). The value “dispersed” probably deserves a better explanation than “there is use”. There should be something that distinguishes dispersed from yes as well.

I found the proposal page via the “what links here” tool on the left of the page. It is sometimes amusing and often informative to look at this automatically generated page. It is also how I confirmed that I hadn’t just missed the link from camp_site when I failed to find it the first time.

Why I wouldn’t use camping=designated is due to the parallels of how “designated” is used. If I have a highway=path marked foot=yes, then I know I am allowed to walk along it. If it is marked foot=designated, then I know it was built for that purpose. It is a stronger form of “yes”. I would expect to find an area that is reserved for camping over other uses, which isn’t what I’m trying to capture. These places where specific sites have been marked in an area that otherwise allows dispersed camping are generally where there was overuse before. The marked sites are usually to consolidate the impact to smaller areas and enforce greater distances between camps. It reduces the area getting used for camping. Other people have used “designated” (21) and “designated_-_fee” (29), but I have not determined what their purpose was.

A possible better tag might be camping=sites. A more long winded possibility might be camping=designated_sites_only. This would be for an area that is not a campground but has had camping limited to designated sites, as is the situation at certain lakes in Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness and yellow post sites. That is different from marking the whole of, say, Sue-meg State Park (California) where camping is allowed in developed campgrounds only, by the density of the sites. One might mark such a place as camping=developed_only. I don’t see being default as much of an argument against.

And, yes, this is getting to the point where it should be stuck on the forum rather than a diary post. I was really attempting to gather thoughts and leave an opening for someone to say “there already is one” prior to making a post. Also, I’ve not actually signed up for the forum yet. Once upon a time, I was on Usenet, but I was getting too emotionally tied up in things there and it was unhealthy. That probably won’t happen on an OSM forum. One would hope. I hadn’t realized this got featured. People do seem to use their diary for full on research papers sometimes. That’s the sort of thing that should be getting featured, surely.

@giggls: I wasn’t finding difference in the “bugs” listed for sites marked with and without red bangs. I’ll look more closely. Maybe play with getting the tagging more complete in some local areas and see how it looks an hour later.

Here are more suggestions for rendering a no camping area: Wallpaper the area with tents marked with a red circle with a line through it. (But these aren’t universal no signs?) Decorate the area with red exes over the usual tent wallpaper similar to paths and roads that are not for public use.

@giggls: Looks like an alright map. The legend doesn’t tell me what red ! marks mean.

I didn’t mark any with tourism=camp_site + access=no since that seems to capture that no one is allowed entry, which is inaccurate, but there is camping somehow. That and any map not understanding would likely explicitly mark it to encourage camping rather than discourage made it far too unappealing.

@Matija Nalis: This does appear to be a good tag, but with some reservations. I see it has few uses now and is only ranked “in use”. That usually indicates it has never been proposed or discussed, just added to the wiki. There does seem to be a proposal page for the wiki, too, but it has no information. I’m not sure of the usual process of this. In order to gain visibility, it should be marked under “see also” on https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:tourism=campsite.

I personally would want more than “yes” or “no”. There is already a mention of “dispersed” getting used, which is much better to use on large areas than “yes” in my view. (But perhaps this is emotion rather than reason. Can I argue this?) I would also want something for “in designated sites only” for forests that have “yellow post sites” or the examples in Maroon Bells-Snowmass Wilderness above. The word “designated” wouldn’t cut it since it has different implications.

Anyway, although the camping key needs discussed and expanded, it is sufficiently satisfying to me to start using on the forbidden sites at least.

@giggls So red areas where there are camping=no tags?

The wiki page doesn’t mention this, but “tourism=trail_riding_station” is an inactive tag. The proposal makes it clear this should be applied to any place giving accommodation to visiting horses.

Talk under amenity=hitching_post suggests amenity=horse_parking + horse_parking=box (see trail riding station for a picture of a box, it says). Although it says horse parking was already in the database, it redirects to amenity=animal_hitch, use access tags to say which animal (horse=designated), and the more elaborate parking of a “box” no longer has room. Or perhaps it does with a little imagination: animal_hitch=corral (vs. ring, rail, or post). (Or box as suggested, or fenced.)

These are amenities in current use, not just historic artifacts. I expect that the corrals by trailheads and in campgrounds host horses, mules, llamas, goats, donkeys, and a few others I’ve not thought of. The one at Soap Creek Corral (linked above) had two mules and a horse. One of the mules was very particular about when breakfast should be and kicked the metal bars when it was late. The sheep corral on Lizard Head Pass (linked above) is part of open grazing that currently occurs and the sheep get rounded up into it every year. I believe they start there when they are brought up in the spring, too. Here’s information on open grazing in Klamath National Forest, including rangeland maps. It’s not related to the sheep, just one I know has online information.

“Sheepfolds” are definitely a good clue and the article you linked is helpful. (I can confirm it’s not a word in much use is the USA.) There are a few places called “stone corral” and I can think of one actual stone corral in the Flat Tops Wilderness in Colorado which looks a lot like these. It is also historic, but there was unlikely to be a homestead nearby. It’s in the one area where it’s hard to find water. It’s very like “on the high fell” and perhaps was for shelter rather than rounding up. The article mentions “gathering pens” on “otherwise unenclosed land”, which is a very close parallel to corrals of the second sort on National Forest land. We have a lot of open grazing and the fees vastly undercut ranchers, so it’s not likely to stop.

That help link describes some of the problems with the mapping. Like the sheepfolds have been mapped as stone walls, the corrals have been mapped as fence. However, just showing that there’s an arrangement of fence it’s very good for someone searching for what that arrangement of fence builds. It makes a good case for using a “man_made” tag.

USGS even fails a bit at capturing the current homesteads. I decided to hike a little way up a river fork and see what might be of an old grave they had marked. I walked around one ranch to the site between two more ranches only to find there was another ranch in between.

Anyway, I’ve made the mistake of poking around Overpass to see what people are using “trail_riding_station” for. Someone in Riverside, California has used it for staging locations that are probably day use only, judging by how much urban is nearby. I’m sure that’s similar to OHV staging in that it just accommodates a trailer so you can park and get out your toys/animals. There’s no temporary accommodation. A lot of buildings (stables?) and arenas have the tag in Europe. I see whole compounds that offer trail riding to the public tagged as this. Maybe, as it is a “tourism” tag, this is what it was meant to be? If so, that isn’t captured by the wiki entry. There’s one probable swimming pool in Texas.

I should probably wander over to the forum and make an attempt there.

Oh, and I guess my answer is: the point of view of the greatest number of users. But that might be a little more abstract than “ground truth” suggests at first.

Seriously, that’s a road. I could see the tread marks from the last drivers of it. Anyone standing there looking at it without further information would say “road”. But I can see where it may be more important to call it a path.

I’d found good use with ctrl allowing me to click near other nodes without connecting to them and was going to try that on the next need. So alt instead…

I dug up the signs which can be seen here and the good news is the casual hiker isn’t going to be left wondering if their feet are going to get wet nor attempt to thrash through the blackberries and over logs as big as they are trying to stay on one side of the creek.

It also clearly describes a trail that could be said to be both “informal” and “official”. Because there’s always a monkey wrench getting into the gears.

I realized there’s another trail nearby that could be described as both “informal” and “official”. Fern Canyon in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park is a destination for some because it has been in some movies. (Jurassic Park 2, I guess? Endor is much further inland for Star Wars fans.) The trail gets minimal maintenance, but there’s still a few fallen trees to navigate. Small seasonal bridges (boards with a few more boards nailed on the end to give about 6 inches height) are placed over some crossings when the creek is low enough, but otherwise the trail is where people have gone.

@SomeoneElse Thank you very much for the visualization! It’s very frustrating trying to look at something that isn’t there.

The bridge north of that point is a seasonal bridge put up when the water is low enough and taken down before the first big storm. This generally translates to June/July-Sept/Oct. I’ve just applied seasonal tag to it. I added an intermittent tag since apparently that’s been the more popular way to do it. Moveable might be wrong, though? Looks like yes. That’s for a swinging bridge or such. Not for may actually be upstream a short way because it is rebuilt every summer.

The bridge to the south is marked as seasonal on park maps, but it’s really a permanent bridge. It should probably be longer, but I don’t see a problem otherwise.

This trail is left unmaintained, and I can only guess that’s the reason it was marked “informal”. There is a sign at each end that says you can get to the other end in 1.5 miles, so I think it’s important information if someone looks up how that happens, they find out that it involves a lot of fords. It could be called seasonal like the bridges since the creek becomes dangerous to cross in winter. (This really is the crux of the whole thing. There is a sign for the trail, the trail should be mapped. This is especially so since it is dangerous during some of the year and not immediately obvious that it would be since it could theoretically stay on one side of the creek.) It is included in NPS material provided to backpackers when they get a permit. Not only do they not discourage access, they even allow camping along much of this trail (with a permit when the creek is not too high).

I think the NPS does discourage off trail travel in this area, but can’t remember for sure. They do allow travel along the creek from 2 miles upstream of Emerald Ridge to at least the northern seasonal bridge, possibly to the park boundary. The stretch I want to map is the only part that really has a trail formed. Some of the other parts also allow camping with a permit.

I tried to review the PDFs the NPS sent me when I got a permit to backpack. At the time, 2 of the 7 didn’t work. Now 4 of the 7 are corrupted. I can’t make this make sense. There was one that had this trail and all its fords carefully mapped. The maps contained in what I can open are the same source as the ones found here. This is a private individual, but they work closely with the park and the maps are used by the land manager (NPS) with permission, but they are not the land manager. They may have made different choices about what to map than NPS would have.

I finally put in a location for myself and was told there’s all these mappers near to me. Most of them have never made edits and the most recent edit from the rest is 4 years ago. However, there is more far flung interest in Redwood State and National Parks area, plus there may be more that haven’t given a location.

No, I actually need to do other things today…

It looks like I need to just learn a little more about JOSM and then be careful. Since it’s been a while, there’s been an edit on the little stub of trail that was left, so I’ll have to be extra careful.

The changesets are linked in the text.

I’m confused about there being two accounts attached to the same email. Where is this happening? I would expect they have created a [email protected] for you and everything gets sent there. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to block the OSM emails if you turn them off in their settings. If that’s on, I expect they sanitize the headers to not show what account it was really sent to and bounce it on. If not on, /dev/null has plenty of space.

People seem to be missing that you had to go to the object you had edited and discover your username from its history. Bing never offered this information.

Footnote 10 is quite interesting. Not my favorite imagery and now down a peg.

The weird thing is that I knew about it because they did get in touch with me, but only after deleting most the trail. Either “I hiked it” and “your map is 60 years old” weren’t enough or the person didn’t know how to change it back either and decided to drop it. There’s plenty of room for this person not to be bad, just coming to bad conclusions based on incomplete information.

I might have noticed the deletions anyway. There’s a number of things I don’t like about my own edits in the area. For instance, the bridges are seasonal. How do I mark that? I can think of a wrong answer: intermediate visibility. In summer and fall, you can see them easily, but in winter and spring you’ll have to search. (And you’ll find them in a pile among the trees. Oh, I made a go at seasonal tagging now, but not by that solution.) Another is that the trails on the west side of the creek follow both service roads (with visible tire marks when I was there) and built trail. I mapped this faithfully to what the trail or road is, but it serves to deemphasize the route of the trails. Maybe I should lie and call it all path? (This seems common, but serves to make the map less useful to the land manager. Maybe that shouldn’t be in my consideration?) Maybe I should pull everything into route relations? (Europe seems to like these for everything, but it’s really just a highlight for long trails around here.)

Now that I’ve had a sleep, my brain has offered that there was at least one other interaction a few years earlier, it’s just not tied up with as much emotion. Someone contacted me to ask why I hadn’t drawn all of a particular trail. That comes back to the untrustworthy USGS because: 1) I hadn’t walked that part of the trail, so didn’t have a track. 2) One thing I knew about the route is that it diverges heavily from the USGS line. 3) There are other ways to hike (offline) on USGS maps, many of them just as free as in beer as the ways to hike on OSM. 4) If I draw that trail wrong, it’s less likely it’ll get drawn by someone who knows better. 5) If I don’t draw that trail, it’s less likely someone will know it’s there to hike it at all, so I have no idea if I’m right not to draw it.

Today, I would say I should have drawn it based on USGS. Move it as best I could to where I could see it in imagery. Apply a “fixit” tag and explain. It feels like no one will look at the fixit out here in the western US, but in an ideal world this gets the most information out there with the greatest likelihood of correction. That particular trail should probably be set to intermediate visibility based on the two ends. (Tomorrow I might have a different opinion. It’s complicated. I console myself by knowing the professionals are all over the place too.)

There’s a little emotion to that too, but not from the interaction. It’s just that I turned 18 in 1995 when the USGS 7.5’ maps were at their peak of accuracy and the lesson that they’ve got some errors, some face-palm stupid, some massive, has been long and repetitive. Except for a few specialty maps in a few places, USGS was the gold standard and realizing they’re pretty tarnished is tough.

So it’s not that bad. But I still want that trail back.