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.
Here, the map seemed to only have jagged representations of the motorcycle trails of the area which usually stayed within half a mile of the actual trail. JOSM has a tool (shortcut w) that shines for this kind of moving a trail to the correct location and adding nodes between. Strava-iD has a less detailed, possibly older map. I’ve been trying to find the tile server address to use for a custom background in other editors, and someone has made that plain for the JOSM editor even though just searching for it generally didn’t work. That’s how popular JOSM is. So I have that data. It already has the FSTopo (in the transparent overlay form) as an option, another I’ve been searching for. Just searching for tile server addresses really hasn’t worked out for me.
Between those two, I moved the existing trails into lovely curvy things that should represent actual trails. I’ve noticed that there are spots where the general route of travel is not the actual trail. (Specifically, when I hiked it, I found trail around one sub-peak on the way to Sockrider that most were missing. The Strava heat doesn’t show it at all. I assure all, the trail is really there and nicer than the other.) Then I started in on added trails in the area that weren’t there at all. Some I can see a bit. One I hiked. Others, especially their lower bits, come from heat. A few are just the FSTopo version. There’s one more trail that’s visible on USGS that I haven’t added. I decided to add in the informal trails up a couple peaks too. Hopefully this isn’t a mistake with all the motorcycles. I also felt the need to add “motorcycles=no” on a few things even after “motor_vehicles=no”. Yeah, I didn’t just forget. The Motor Vehicles Use Map is the legal document that allows motor vehicle use and it says no motorcycles on these. Also, the Forest Service was doing a good job of signing it.
After a few iterations as I added in layers I could consult, I called this done.
I noticed that the further networks of trails also need a lot of adding, but getting further from where I actually hiked and knew about, I was getting uncomfortable with adding. Some of these have been removed from the current electronic recreation map. (Don’t know what to call this one. It’s powered by Esri and found on USDA sites to map where recreation opportunities exist.) Also uncomfortable were the trails that are on the rec map and the FSTopo and even the map at the Priest Gulch Trailhead, but seem to be at houses at the bottom.
Across the canyon is the Colorado Trail, and it’s a further adventures of badly handled CT. The old name is Highline Trail. The FSTopo puts the name Highline (without trail because they are inconsistent about writing trail on the end when it’s obviously a trail) on one side of the line and Colorado Trail on the other. Someone has named it “Highline - Co. Trail”. It’s two names. At least it doesn’t say (Segment #) after it. I found a couple trails without names and added them, but didn’t evaluate the route they take. Then I clicked on that route and decided to leave it all alone.