Discussion: Cliff trail!

Me too! I was really confused when I saw the trail, and then very happy when I realised I didn't have to bash through the scrubby looking stuff after all.

Goof luck with your talk!

Or even good luck! I left the typo because it was funny.

Me too, on the cliff-trail.

You're not a fan of goof luck then? I think that sounds pretty fun.

goof luck is what i DO. =)

You all sound goofy to me ;)

I did the same thing - read the two dashes as cliffs and went through the woods instead. Cost me 20s.

I did the same but I had a good split. Figures. Also, goof luck, Ali!

=) Thanks all for the goof luck, sounds cheery, and maybe a goofy presentation will entertain, at the least...

Woo company on the cliff-trail mistake, feel slightly less silly, but was there anything we should have noted to figure out it really was a trail? Lines are thicker than cliffs without tags?

According to the spec they are both the same width (0.52mm @1:10).
Impassable rock faces should always have slope tags unless space is short (presumably so we can tell them apart from roads :). For passable rock faces the slope tags are optional, but then there's the problem of confusion with small trails.

The context is tough. A short segment of jeep track between two patches of bare rock? It never even occurred to me that it might be a trail. I guess I've seen them without tags so often that I always use context or length to distinguish them.

Likewise. I went through the finish chute because cliffs in green looked bad and then even the white woods looked nasty. Cost 30s.

Everyone I talked to thought they were cliffs. I was pretty glad to see a jeep trail instead.

I was pretty sure it was a jeep-track segment, perhaps a lucky set of guesses, but for reference, this is why...

In part, I've done enough OCAD drafting, and fighting with trail segment dashes, to realize this was quite consistent with a short jeep-track - but that still left the ambiguity, as I also realized it could be a cliff pair. But then the area around the spectator control (which I'd seen earlier) and the area partway toward the spectator control (which I'd seen on the way to the pre-spectator control), and the map+prior-terrain, all suggested the straight route area was pretty flat, which didn't seem consistent with two tall-enough-to-be-impassible cliffs - so that tipped the scales toward jeep-track.

T'was my best split of the weekend (4th.) Tied, perhaps not coincidentally, with my 4th on the spectator control at the Sprint. Apparently it pays to look at the spectator control area in advance (something I intentionally did at the Sprint too.)

I did a full recon of the arena before the race (with the provided map snippet), as did Ali and the others, but I couldn't make out anything that looked like a trail leading into the spectator control. It just looked like bare rock ending at treeline. The contours fall away into that reentrant just below the jeep track, making it look just like the caprock cliffs around #8. I was thinking cliffs all the way.

Interesting from a mappers perspective. I think I would normally be hesitant to draw such a short section of vehicle track that isn't connected to a road/trail network with the wide 505 symbol. Narrow ride (509) would probably have worked better in this instance even though it might not be technically correct. (I have no idea what the jeep-track looks like in reality, but at least in Scandinavia the narrow ride-symbol is often used for tracks from forestry machines, jeeps, ATVs and so on where the runnability can be anything from good to terrible).

However, if the jeep track was improved with gravel or other means to make it a real "road", the mapper really has no other choice than to map it the way it was done.

As a mapper I put on tags as often as possible, but I know many mappers who do not.
I think it looks artistically better without the tags, but a an orienteer, I really like to see those tags, Not only does it distinguish it as a cliff, but also easily shows me which way is downhill.