[Talk-GB] Advice please: Goat tracks in mountain areas

Gruff Owen gruff.owen at gmail.com
Sat Feb 5 14:26:18 UTC 2022


Hi all,

I'd be very grateful if you could advise on this subject.

As a brief bit of background, I'm a volunteer and incident coordinator for
Llanberis mountain rescue team, who cover Snowdon in North Wales. And I
have also previously worked as a National Park Warden for the area, so I
know the area and "path" concerned very well.

I'm specifically interested in the following Way, which was added to OSM
around 5 months ago: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/982094029

It has been tagged as:
bicycle:no
highway:path
horse:no

In my judgement / experience, I would say that this Way is best described
as a "Goat track". It is a very familiar feature for the rescue team
because it is commonly followed in error by members of the public who are
attempting to continue on from Bwlch Coch up via Crib y Ddysgl to Carnedd
Ugain. A quick check of our statistics show that we've attended 13
incidents here over the last 4 years, but my experience tells me that a
great many more will have had negative experiences along this track without
having to involve the rescue team.

For balance, a small number of walkers do choose to follow this track
deliberately, but that is rare as it covers poor ground and is not very
enjoyable terrain. With loose bouldery ground and a number of steep gullies
where we have attended a number of serious accidents / fatalities over the
years.

In terms of access rights. It is not a Public RIght of Way, but it does sit
within CRoW 2001 Access Land.

The reason this has come to my attention is that Strava have now updated
their background mapping from OSM, and it is now one of the newly brought
in "paths" which their users will be able to see on the map as a potential
route.

My main concern is that increased usage of this Way could lead to further
incidents, but I am also concerned about the conservation impact that
increased usage along this way may have.

I'd very much appreciate your views on this and would be interested if
similar Ways have been discussed in the past? I'm a relative newbie to OSM
so I'm a bit reluctant to propose a solution, but I expect that it would
involve removal, or tagging appropriately so that features of this nature
are not "scraped" up as routes by services such as Strava / Komoot etc??

Many thanks in advance,

Gruff
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