Backcountry huts in OSM - alpine or wilderness?

[Chris Gadd]

Hi,

I'm very new to this, so when adding a missing hut into OSM I read the wiki on how to create it, which suggests the tag tourism=wilderness_hut. But looking around it seems most of the huts in NZ are alpine_hut, due to the import rules in the LINZ-2-OSM script. I found an old discussion on this group from 2013 which decided not to change because the distinction had only just been made and rendering for wilderness_hut didn't exist. Five years on OSM definitely renders wilderness huts (although not as nice/appropriately as alpine huts IMO), so what do people think about changing? Current status is now a bit of a mix (from this Overpass code):

• Alpine: 969
• Wilderness: 112
• Basic: 31
  

Here's a sample map of them (Overpass code), with alpine=red, wilderness=green, basic=purple.

I'm happy to update, and can do a PR against the Github repo, but it seems like this is the place to look for any consensus.

thanks!

chris

[Simon Walter]

Hi Chris,

I did walk the Te Araroa this year and was a bit confused by this as well.

So I vote to change it to wilderness_hut.

I added and fixed some of the huts myself.

Problem with fixing all the huts is that we don't really know who maintains them and what service they provide. Most are managed by doc, but some of them are private cabins and not even open to the public.

A good datasource for an import of huts-POIs in NZ would probably be: https://api.doc.govt.nz/docs/huts/index.html

--

Regards

Simon

[Chris Gadd]

Thanks for the pointer to the API. I'll compare with that and have a crack at updating a bunch. Will post here and in the new mailing list (https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-nz).