Excessive mapping of mountaineering/climbing routes

Mappers are free to map what interests them, as long as the things mapped can be verified by other mappers : these appear to be edits by someone interested in climbing mountains. Information regarding suitable routes up mountains can often be very useful: I see no problem in adding such information to OSM. Commonly used routes in the European Alps such as Piz Palu are already on OSM, and similarly winter routes are also mapped in the same area.

There are issues because we do not have a well formed and widely used group of tags for mapping some of the elements of a route like this. This description of an ascent of Survey Peak makes clear that parts of the route are following vestigial traces of a trail, others involve 'bushwacking' and probably the higher parts of the route are following natural lines. Ideally all these different aspects would be tagged and mapped differently: in particular so that climbing lines are not prone to be interpreted as routes for ordinary walkers (we do have the SAC Scale tagging which provides a well-tried way of making such disambiguation). I see nothing in this description which suggests this peak is extreme: on the contrary there are many OSM contributors who would be happy to climb it if it was in their area.

Also the route as mapped seems to include an excessive number of ele tags (one per node) suggesting that it is an unrefined GPS trace. This is not particularly good practice: but given the user may have a substantial backlog of previous expeditions which they want to add to OSM, not particularly reprehensible either. As OSM data can be iteratively refined, all of this data can be improved.

If you want the Glacier Lake trail on OSM, get out there and map it.

Being both a hiker and a climber, I believe that it's misleading to have routes ranging from easy trails to difficult mountaineering routes on the same map without any form of distinction. Frankly, on normal topographic maps I don't expect anything beyond difficult hiking and easy mountaineering routes. To me, the limit is nothing beyond PD for mountaineering routes and nothing beyond around UIAA grade II (roughly YDS 5.2, maybe a short 5.3).

For some I reckon that that's already too much. I can imagine that there are those that might not want to see anything that doesn't follow a trail. More intrepid hikers might want to see important routes, even without a trail, as long as it's possible to follow them without having to use your hands. In any case, regardless of the upper limit, if a map does go as far as to show routes that do not follow trails anymore, I would expect to see (almost) all hiking trails as well.

However, OSM being open source means that it's up to us, the contributors, to enter all these trails. The whole principle of voluntary contributions means that things will be missing. Generally speaking, the more active contributors there are for any particular area, the better the map will be. But with a limited number of contributors, we'll just have to live with what there is, and make a few improvements ourselves if we can.

For crag climbing rather than mountaineering, it would be helpful to be able to mark the principal areas, rather than routes, described in the relevant climbing guidebook. I am thinking of a time when I was climbing at Swanage, and on the walk-in I was asked how to find a climbing area mentioned in the book. The group looked possibly a little inexperienced, so had they abseiled into the wrong area, they could have been in trouble. It would not be feasible to map individual routes because there are so many of them, and because they are mostly vertical. For mountaineering, it would probably be useful to have the line of a route loaded on to a GPS (and could be a life-saver in an Alpine blizzard), but there must be no risk of a walking party mistaking it for a hiking trail. Do we need some new tags for steeper routes?