On Fri, Dec 21, 2018 at 1:13 PM Peter Elderson <pelder...@gmail.com> wrote: > > Maybe I misinterpreted information I got from another source. I've checked > and found info like this: > https://www.nps.gov/search/?affiliate=nps&query=trailhead . I found several > sites listing named trailheads for specific parks with # parking spaces and > other details.
Trails managed by the National Park Service are a minority of trails in the US. The NPS definition for 'trailhead' isn't too different from mine: "anywhere that you can get to a trail from a road." NPS has standard signage that's placed at (many of) them. It's more organized than most other outfits that maintain trails. Still, most of their trailheads consist of a few parking spaces and a sign. > The route starting points in Nederland are multimodal, named, have to fulfill > some requirements, and are recognizable in the field as such by some kind of > landmark feature such as an oversize green grass halm, cone of stones, > oversize key. They were occasionally mapped as tourism=artwork. We would not > consider any waymarked path leading into a nature area to be a trailhead. A > verifyable name would be required, at least. OK, that's different from here. Some trailheads have names, but they're usually just identified by a nearby geographic feature: "the Averyville Road trailhead," "the Roaring Brook trailhead," "the trailhead across from the monastery at Meads Mountain." Most of our trail termini, even for major regional and national trails, are just waymarked paths leading into a nature area, perhaps with a more elaborate sign. Most of the National Park trailheads are little different from the one I described as 'posh'. Except for a handful of major trails, we don't have any sort of fancy monumenting of trailheads, and even some of our most significant trails are simple footpaths leading into nature areas. The eastern terminus of the thousand-kilometre Finger Lakes Trail looks like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finger_Lakes_Trail#/media/File:FingerLakesTrail_East_End.jpg. From your description, I suspect that in the US, we don't have anything that a Nederlander would recognize as a 'trailhead,' including the ones in those NPS listings. A notice board, perhaps with a map, a guidepost, and a footpath heading off somewhere are all that you can expect at most of ours. (If a trailhead leaves a developed area of a park, maybe a rubbish bin, or a toilet, but don't count on those!) Many trailheads are just a spot where a rural road has a wide enough verge to park a couple of cars, and one or more waymarked trails leading off somewhere. Quite a few are 4WD-only, like the one in the picture of a "more humble" trailhead. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
