• Fees: Yes. Fees & Passes - Saguaro National Park
• Dogs: No
• Bikes: Yes. One of the few trails in Saguaro National Park East that allows bikes.
• Trail Type: Out and Back

In October I had the chance to use the Pointless Waymarks CMS to generate a pop-up site for the Summit Hut Tucson 2024 Oboz Trail Experience to provide a single location for the participants to get trail descriptions and extra information about the event.

Some pages from the site are preserved as images below since the site isn't intended to run 'forever': Tucson 2024 Oboz Trail Experience, Ridge View Trail - Saguaro National Park East, Tag List and All Content Search.

I think of the default, and intended, style of sites generated by the Pointless Waymarks CMS to be minimal and small-web inspired. A common enough aesthetic these days for techies - but certainly not what I see with mainstream sites and marketing... So it was a bit of a surprise that the style of this site really didn't generate any meaningful negative comments from either the Summit Hut Team or, that I am aware of, from customers. It made me wonder if the diverse media that a imagined-average Tucson citizen is exposed to - everything from twitter to full interactive web apps - means that the diversity of visual styles that are 'normal' is quite a bit wider than I had guessed. We didn't do focus groups or test other designs so this is just for-fun pondering but still interesting!

I'm happy with the functionality and content on the trail pages we created and after talking to participants in the event for the first time in 4 or 5 years it made me interested in posting trail descriptions online. I have worked on quite a few trail pages in the past - but in recent years I've wondered if it was a net-positive to post about specific trails. Between apps like AllTrails and the negative impacts that over-use can have on outdoor spaces it takes some thought to decide what is responsible to share. This Event really highlighted the positive side of posting trails online with participants excited about the selection of trails and many people doing (and liking!) trails they had never seen.

To make posting Trails online via the Pointless Waymarks CMS easier over the past month I have been working on a new 'Trails' content type - this post is Trail Content. Some features and benefits:

• The Start and End of the Trail can be defined by Point Content that can easily be reused by multiple Trails
• The Trails reference a Map Component so that it is easy to bring together more complex map content
• A Map Component is referenced but the line that defines the path of the Trail is also referenced so that stats and an elevation profile can be displayed
• Having Trails as a type means that the search page for trails can have better options

Still a work in progress the Trail Content is not meant to be infinitely flexible or turn the Pointless Waymarks CMS into a complete Trails CMS or support auto-generating large amounts of trail information from GIS sources - rather the focus is mainly on hiking and running and human generated content!