ANY SIGNED-IN HIKER CAN DO THIS

Put a club on the map for them

Hiking somewhere new and the local club publishes maps nobody can use offline? Give us their website. We go looking for their trail data, and their trails go on the map — unclaimed, until somebody from the org comes and takes it over.

STEP 1 · THEIR WEBSITE

That is all we need. We open their published pages — looking for a maps page, a GIS server, a downloads link, or a data portal — and show you what was on them, to keep or throw away line by line.

You will be asked to sign in. Reading somebody's website is something we will only do for a hiker we can name, and the reading costs us a little to run — an account is how both of those stay true. Your browser also does a few seconds of arithmetic on the way, which is what stops this being used a thousand times an hour by somebody who is not you.

This gives you no standing at their org, and asks nothing of them.

WHAT COMES BACK · AN EXAMPLE, NOT A LIVE RESULT

What we look for on a club's site

Every one of these is checked by a person before anything of a club's reaches a map. This is what that reading usually turns up.

  • An ArcGIS FeatureServer usable Line features with a blaze field and a published edit date. The best case: we can read it again tomorrow and tell them what changed.
  • A WFS or GeoJSON endpoint usable Same test, different shape. Anything at a URL that answers with geometry and keeps answering.
  • A closures or alerts feed closures Live JSON we can read hourly once they approve it — the one source where being an hour old matters.
  • PDF trail maps not accepted We do not take these. A PDF cannot be re-read, so it is stale the day it is uploaded — and taking a snapshot while implying a feed is worse than taking nothing. Ask them for the layer behind it.
  • Membership and donation pages found We put these in front of every hiker walking their trails. The money goes straight to them and is never routed through OurHike.
  • Whatever their terms say read by a person Asked before the bytes are in a build, which is the one thing this project has got wrong twice already.

Nothing publishes because you submitted it. A nomination records the organization as unclaimed and puts it in front of a person here. Three admins at that organization still have to approve before a single section of theirs reaches a phone — the same rule as an org that signs itself up, and the reason submitting somebody else's trails is a favour rather than a liability.