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by wafflemaker 21 days ago
I was once on a trip in Åndalsness, one of the most scenic places in Norway. Fjords, mountains, you know it.

On the walk to our cabin, a little outside of town, I was checking something on OSM, might have been just learning to use it and read it (it has some learning curve when switching from G-maps).

To my surprise, I saw a shortcut/walking path exiting from the road we were walking on. Already used such paths twice that day for a nice shortcut that didn't show up on G-maps. But there was nothing there.

I told my friend that I'd like to check what this strange hacker map is showing. When we looked again, we noticed that there actually was a trail uphill, what at first sight seemed to just be a forested hillside.

As we went up, the trail started to be more evident. We climbed for a couple minutes, went past a cabin with no road leading to it (pretty normal in Norway), and a few more minutes after it we arrived at a semi-top, with a big boulder and a picturesque view out from that viewpoint.

Very cool memory on the last day of the holidays, made possible thanks to somebody marking that trail on OSM.

3 comments

I did something like that for my local area (in about 2012). It turned into a hobby, whereby I spent a couple of years on foot exploring the local bush in minute detail and used OSM to document what I found. There are features on OSM that exist on no other map, especially off-road. I know other people do this too, as similar obscure tracks have appeared in neighbouring areas.

I've been on a number of orienteering or rogaining events where the maps look familiar, and it turns out they have used my OSM data. It's been great to see something lasting come from that mapping effort. (It's also a nice bonus in such events to be that familiar with the map and its covered area!) I suspect some local bush fire brigade members might also be looking at OSM, as a number of the fire trails I mapped seem to have had names added.

Back in 2019 OSM helped us by showing a walking path back from the Shiroyama Park hill in Kagoshima, Japan. It has a beautiful view of the city of Kagoshima and the towering Sakurajima volcano across the bay.

Google Maps only showed some car only roads and tunnels leading back to the city. But OSM showed a walking path comming down from one of the parking areas.

And indeed, it was there and we arrived back down in the city in a few minutes, avoiding lengthy backtracking.

Found it! It's on the southern exit from the Mjelva village. Viewpoint is not marked. It felt like a quite a private place, so I don't really want to post more details.

Someone dedicated can still easily find it.

You're right. Last holidays, I went to beautiful place in Spain. A way covered in Ferns was marked as an OSM path. I guess it was, but did not get cut this year or the later. So we tried and failed 30 m after.

It's important to keep some mysteries despite precise maps.

That's why I'm at the same time fascinated by 3D "splats", but also worried to be spoiled.

They're great for places we already know (inspect your roof's shape for instance), but they spoil discovery.

Last week I discovered apple's own photogrammetry library. https://developer.apple.com/documentation/realitykit/creatin...

I used it to reconstruct a 3D mesh of a bouldering wall. It worked perfectly. No gaussian splatting involved. I think the boundary between virtual and real world does get thinner by the day

Not that thin. You can’t climb the virtual wall.
Too late. Plans to build a 7-11 there are already underway now, thanks to this post.