Ideas?

Rock bivvies & camping: I agree with a separate category of hut (place to stay) for rock bivies / natural shelters. Call it what you want, but don't confuse with bivvies which can be quite flash, sandfly-proof man-made structures. Been musing over the idea of asking for a way of recording camping spots for a few years now. The reason I didn't was the fear of ending up with information overload: search in an area (or look at the 'nearby' section of the scree) and get every 6"x4" spot of flattish ground that someone's put a tent up on. I reckon there'd need to be some guidelines if campsites and camping spots were to be included: and definitely the two categories of serviced camping locations (campsites) and _good_ freedom-camping 'camping spots'.

Yes, on thinking about it, I agree with what you say. A camping spot is in the eye of the beholder. A friend of mine used to say "I am not looking for a place to camp, I am looking for a place to sleep". Any consecutive 2 square metres of flattish ground would do for him. Which brings me to a discussion I had a couple of years back. I even wrote a letter to Wilderness Magazine about it. Ray Jardine in his books talks about "Stealth Camping", which is really low impact camping. Considering the amount of places that do not allow camping, then I wonder if a new word should be invented to cover low impact camping which is really no more offensive than a picnic. I did once refer to an illegal camp near a Great Walk Track as "an early picnic breakfast". from that came the word "picnak" but it didn't stick.

Routes and locations: All the talk of 'locations' brings me back to musings I had many years ago (when there was less information on this site) over how the information would develop. I imagined NZ tramper would end up being a sort-of online, nationwide 'Moir's Guide'. There would be a series of locations: huts, roadends, campspots, forks, etc, and route guides between them. So if I was poring over a map looking at options from the Landsborough to the Karangarua there would be short route guides to the Karangarua saddle (Rubicon Biv to Christmas Hut) and the Douglass Pass (Rubicon Biv to Horace Walker Hut). Instead we seem to have gone for long, complete descriptions of entire tramps from roadend to roadend. This is probably better for many users: beginners looking for ideas for walks, overseas visitors. So by going down this route we've broadened the scope of the site and probably made more of a contribution to promoting the NZ backcountry than any 'Moir's guide'-style information could (which would after all, be preaching to the converted). But it means I still have to dig out Moirs if I want to know what the going over so-and-so pass is like. And what about areas without such guides?

On campsites, I think it would be only official ones. They often have facilities such as water, and you often have to pay. I think that they would be set up as a separate class of object. For tracks like the Great Walks, it's useful to know about campsites. For more everyday tracks, they're pretty much irrelevant.

On routes and locations: aside from advanced routes, many areas have a rich network of linked tracks such as around Lake Sumner and the Cobb Reservoir. These areas are better served by a diagram with lines on it (like the DOC brochures) than by a series of individual descriptions. I am just about to launch a big new map which makes it much easier to explore areas. The goal is that tracks and routes will start to show up as lines instead of a series of points although that's not in place yet. There is nothing to stop sections being added now. However, it would probably be confusing if they came up in regular search results (perhaps there needs to be some kind of roadend flag). Your thoughts?

I like the idea of "Virtual Cairns". In the old days people would build cairns in the wilderness to mark a point that you leave the river or a track begins etc etc. Some people would find these useful while others would not like them because they prefered not to see man made objects in the wilderness. Virtual Cairns only exist in cyberspace so you can use them if you wish or ignore them if you want the more wild experience.

Virtual cairns might disappear when the battery on the GPS goes flat or the Americians start another war and the GPS suddenly developes as serious offset. I love cairns when I'm disoriented, but hate them when I'm not!

Its not the technology, its the information that matters. Information can just as easily be printed, or written, on a piece of paper, or even just remembered.