Show skitours in vector maps

Thanks, it makes sense. But I'm not sure about the color. Locus themes have defined different color for piste:type = downhill based on piste:difficulty If you can see yellow color for piste:type = downhill it should be slope for freeride.

So the question is: should be skitour

rendered also based on piste:difficulty tag or should we use only one transparent color?

What about to use the colors only when the piste:difficulty is set and the light blue otherwise?

The difficulty is typically used only in ski resorts and it makes sense there. I haven't seen them used on skitours or downhills alone yet. The difficulty is changing quickly in the free terrain so it does not even make much sense.

You can check e. g. around Argentière near Chamonix or Zermatt where are both pistes in a ski resort with difficulty set and free skitours with the only tag piste:type = skitour.

Bonus would be to differentiate the downhills by sparse arrows down if possible.

Well I tried to get some inspiration from other winter maps. I have to say that I like the idea to display skitours in one (probably transparent) color. But I don't want to add some arrows into downhill ways. Additionally downhill are sometimes areas, so it would be complicated to render them properly.

What about render skitours as dotted lines? See OpenSnowmap.org

So I would personally rather keep the downhills in a same style in light blue as skitours. I find dots confusing for next reasons.

I don't like a OpenStreetMap and derivates styles much because it is hard to understand what those styles mean without seeing the legend. I think the cartographers did a better job in intuitiveness of reading the map and their patterns are used across all the printed maps now. I would try to use similar style.

• Dotted lines are used for difficult terrain: e. g. via ferrata or MTB tracks not suggested to ride by normal bikes. The dots/interruptions evoke that it is harder to pass than a standard terrain, which is not the case for skitours. E. g. part of the skitours might be super easy while other parts might be possible to pass only by crampons (those would make sense to make dotted to indicate that). But I don't think there is a style for that in OSM already.

If you don't like arrows, I would suggest to give up on differentiating downhills and skitours. It is not that critical. But see pistes here: it might not look weird and it works in an intuitive way that the arrows indicates direction (down). Together with contours and hillshading it makes the map more readable. But I understand areas might be the problem.

Just for an inspiration: another example of everything in one map: summer and winter together and yet it is lucid and readable:

• line for paths
• dashed lines for mountainous terrain
• dotted lines for via ferrata
• blue lines for winter paths
• there are even colored summer tracks in a same view

I like these principles: less visible or even interrupted = harder to pass. Blue to differentiate winter snow tracks from summer.

Any progress here? Winter is coming!

Thank you for reminding. Ski theme changed I also change the rendering of routes for nordic skiing (based on discussion with myneur) See the screenshots