VTHiking

About VTHiking

VTHiking is a map of Vermont's hiking trails with one thing the big national apps mostly ignore: what it actually costs to park at the trailhead.

Why parking?

Trail maps are commodity. Trailhead parking is not. Whether a lot is free, charges a fee, requires a permit, or fills by 8am on a Saturday is the question people actually have before they drive an hour — and it is not published in any statewide dataset. We checked: Vermont's open geodata has parking lot locations and capacity, but no fee field at all.

So we are collecting it by hand, county by county. That is slow, and the site is honest about how far it has got: 21 of 506 trailheads verified so far.

How we verify, and what the labels mean

A lot only gets a verified label when the people who run the land say so in their own words: a state park page, a town or park district, a land trust. We read the page, match it to the lot by its published address or its distance from the named park, and record the date and what the source said. You can open How we know this on any verified page to see it. We do not rely on blogs, aggregators or search summaries for the answer.

Verified: Free
Verified. No fee to park, per the land manager.
Verified: Paid
Verified. A fee applies; the amount is on the page.
Verified: Permit
Verified. A permit or pass is needed.
Fee unconfirmed
We have not confirmed it. Most Vermont trailheads publish nothing about parking, so this is the common case rather than a warning. Sometimes we looked and found rules but no fee, and the page shows those rules. 86 unconfirmed lots also carry a volunteer's tag in OpenStreetMap saying free or paid; we show that as a hint and never as a finding.

When a source and a sign disagree, trust the sign, and tell us.

Where the data comes from

Trail geometry, names, parking locations, peaks and shelters come from OpenStreetMap, used under the Open Database License. Elevations, climb figures and the profile charts come from the USGS 3D Elevation Program, and the satellite and topo maps from the USGS National Map, both public domain. Full details on the attribution page.

Trailheads are not published as data anywhere, so we derive them from public parking areas and from trailhead markers mapped in OpenStreetMap. Business, resident and private lots are left out. Lots within 120 metres of each other are treated as one trailhead.

Each trail is then linked to the parking you can reach along the mapped trail network, and the page says how far:

Start here
The parking area is on the trail, within about 250 metres.
On foot
A walk-in of up to 1 km along connecting trails, with the trail you would walk along named where it is known.
Nearest parking
Shown only when nothing closer is mapped: up to 3 km along trails.

Distances follow the mapped lines. They are not a route, they ignore slope, and they are not driving directions. This is a heuristic, so it produces some false matches and misses some real trailheads. Trails with no parking mapped within 3 km show no link at all.

Descriptions, difficulty and estimates

Some of the best-known hikes have a description we wrote ourselves, from the land manager's or trail club's own published information. Each one names its sources and the date we checked them. Everywhere else we show only what OpenStreetMap has. We would rather show nothing than make something up about terrain you are going to walk on.

Climb, time and difficulty are estimates, worked out from the mapped line and USGS elevation data, and every page labels them that way. They are not official ratings. Where OpenStreetMap grades how technical the footing is, that appears separately as terrain.

What this site deliberately does not do

Corrections and contributions

If you know a trailhead's parking situation — especially a fee, a permit rule, or a lot that fills early — that is exactly the information this site exists to collect.

For wrong or missing trail geometry, the best fix is editing OpenStreetMap directly. The correction then flows here on the next data refresh, and helps every other map as well.

Contact details to be added before launch.