> 47 Great Hiking GR® trails have been brought together in a single path to create this thru hike.
Fun fact: the GR trails, and hence this through route, aren’t allowed to be mapped in OpenStreetMap.
The federation that administers them, the FFRP, claims copyright in them as a creative work. French law agrees.
You can see the little red and white trailblazing marks on trees, but you can’t record that information and put it into OSM. If you want a map, you need an FFRP-licensed product.
That's not selfish, GRs are sometimes crossing natural park in which nature and wilderness related laws are enforced, there are people that can sue you if you smoke a cigarette/walk in certain areas/throw some trash at the ground/camp in les calanques de marseille for example (the south of france is highly inflammable during summer). In order to maintain the local biodiversity, keep a minor impact of the local wilderness of these places (endangered species often), some money has to be raised, experts have to be paid to help decisions (should a trail be modified for X reasons related to what I said supra, should some trees be cut down for security reasons, should some security lanes be created to prevent fires etc...), which then requires the intervention of professionals to apply these decisions.
You also have to pay "rangers" sometimes (I don't know of many parks of france, i'm mainly talking about calanques and cevennes).
When I go climbing I have to buy a local guide documenting all the historical climbing spots; the persons that sells the guide are the one that equipped and maintened these historical routes : is it selfishness ?
What's not fun at all is when every pretty place is a GPS coordinate and then swarmed by people who only want to take a picture of themselves and have little regard for nature.
It's very common near where I live for the agencies who manage trails and other unique spots to opt-out of GPS-enabled maps (like Avenza) and to actively monitor social media to ask that people refrain from naming 'photo opp' locations.
Someone made the effort to string together the info on all the connecting trails and figure out where to bivouac, etc., and started a non-profit association to continue the effort, so they're charging. How is that selfish? If you're that intent on hiking the trail without paying then go ahead and figure it out on your own.
I would guess OpenStreetMap could record the location of each marker without linking them in trails or using the official logo of the markers (“one of our contributors saw a marker labeled ‘13’ here” should be public info, shouldn’t it?), but even if that’s the case, I can see they don’t have the resources to go and try that in court.
That’s so weird, I wonder how that works. If I’m the first to make a map or a street or any geographic object in France, it can’t be featured on any other map, unless so license it?
> That’s so weird, I wonder how that works. If I’m the first to make a map or a street or any geographic object in France, it can’t be featured on any other map, unless so license it?
A GR isn't a geographic object, it is a sequence of trails that has been arbitrarily chosen by the author among all the possible sequences of trails.
The gr are pretty well maintained and that takes energy. So the analogy is lacking a bit here, even though I think that this seems somewhat backward and there should be a better solution.
> If you want a map, you need an FFRP-licensed product.
On the government site https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/ one can select "Carte topographique IGN" and the GRs seem to be marked.
Whether the government has a license or they are just the government I don't know. But as an end user I can use them for free. I have not studied the conditions for republication.
Last time i plotted points with coordinates from the English Wikipedia i noted the density of points falls off dramatically in France compared to its neighbors. That kind of attitude is widespread in advance.
Surely the coordinates still get leaked through 3rd party apps like Strava, then become visible on the Strava Heatmap. Quite ridiculous they’d try to keep the information private in this day and age.
This trail only opened last year, and was inspired by the US Pacific Crest Trail. The creator (from Chamonix) quit his tech job and journeyed from South America to Canada, and while on the PCT wondered why doesn't France have its own grand mountain trail? So he and a few others planned this route, crowdfunded an app to consolidate its info (campsites, water sources) and came up with this. https://www.connexionfrance.com/article/Mag/Nature/New-3-000...
Nice story. But all the guy did is take parts of 47 trails that have been around for decades and put them in a single map. The trail didn't "open last year". The website did, maybe.
Yep - like the article says, he didn't hire backhoes and trail crew to build new trail. The route as a new linkup of GR's opened last year due to the creation of the app. Planning the route of 3,000 km with water sources, road crossings, camp sites, towns, points of interest is a massive amount of work though. Think of building a Google Maps-level rich display of a path across the US starting from just paper maps and Wikipedia, knowing that users could potentially be in danger in the wilderness if the information is wrong. This is a huge effort and I have no doubt that this will become a very popular route because of his work. This was a heavy lift in GIS!
Yep I’ve done a good chunk of Stage 2 it seems, because much of it is part of the Tour du Mont Blanc. I can’t rave enough about the experience, though. It’s a beautiful trek well worth doing. Especially that segment.
The hexa prefix at first made me think that the trail went around the entirety of mainland France, commonly known as l'Hexagone [0]. However, from what I see, it "only" goes along 3 of the 6 sides [1] (not that it makes it any less impressive!).
I never understood that expression. When I look at a the outline of France, I see a pentagon, with the Pyrenees and the Côte d’Azur forming a single side.
Yes, that’s a side made up of a mountain range and a coast, but to my eye, it fits way better than the hexagon of https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagone_(France). You can fix that around about any somewhat country whose outline isn’t very elongated such as Germany, Iceland or Poland.
If you directly connect Biarritz to Monaco you do get a pentagon and a reasonably good fit to the actual border; but the angle between the border and the coast at Perpignan is so tight (well under 90° at higher zoom levels but close to a right angle even at a glance) that it feels like it ought to be a point of the surrounding polygon. (Treating the Pyrenees as a separate "side" from the Med coast also means that each side is either land or sea, not both.)
In this case, “hexa” (meaning “6”) is the number of stages of this trail. A bit arbitrary though but I guess it hints at the fact that it’s a French trail, France being referred to as “l’Hexagone” like you said, even when talking about only part of it.
Covering three sides is exactly the same amount of impressive as covering six sides?
I can imagine the impressiveness isn’t linear with sides, so it doesn’t have to half as impressive, but I would expect some dependence.
Maybe it saturates? So covering three sides is peak impressiveness, and any more sides has no effect?
Although your language leaves open the possibility that covering three sides is more impressive than covering six sides. Not sure why that would be, but maybe three sides is the optimum?
Your joke went on too long. If you'd just said "Well, I'd call that about half as impressive." and left it at that, I doubt you'd be getting downvoted to hell.
Pommes and oranges and I don’t mean it competitively, but the Trans Canada Trail system being 24,000km vs France’s 3,000km really puts into perspective for me just how much space we have here.
Europe always feels really small when examining any single country. I still feel surprised by the idea that you can drive across many of these countries in less than a day.
But france is extremely diverse in nature relative to its size. This trail goes through wet lowlands to coasty areas, through ancient vulcanic areas. High mountains, dry grounds etc.
You have travel a hell lot further in most other places.
True but you see very different landscapes in these 3000kms and probably more diverse than in the 24000km of the Canadian trail.
Also if you like history you probably can visit some castles from different centuries along the way.
But it is true that on the French trail you cannot experience real wilderness where you encounter no humans for days and fear to do a bad encounter with wildlife.
The only wildlife that you'd probably see are ibex/chamois, beavers, vultures/eagles in the mountains, and if you are lucky wild boars, foxes, squirrels, deers, snakes and extremely lucky wolves in the Alps and bears in the Pyrenees.
Western Canada alone is absolutely stunning and wild af. You won't find a wilderness like that anywhere in Europe anymore. It's not for the faint of heart at all. While I am a pretty experienced backpacker I stayed away from most remote areas in western Canada. Even a day trip would take me on a peak that would be hiked just a few times per year. Zero cell service too.
It's very... civilized. I was riding my bike on part of it without knowing I was. It's not what I would call a backpacking experience to compare with the AT, CDT, etc. I'm sure this isn't either, as there's no real wilderness in France, but it sure is more appealing to me than El Camino.
Yeah the Ways of Saint James is a pilgrimage route (or a catchment thereof until you reach the Camino francés), so it's supposed to be accessible to most everyone, and would have way stations all along as pilgrims of the early middle ages could hardly be assumed to carry months worth of necessities.
For those who don't know, the Chemin Saint Jacques (or Camino de Santiago, or Way of Saint James) is a pilgrimage route (or rather a network of pilgrimage routes) which goes all the way to Santiago de Compostela in northwestern Spain. Spanish "Santiago" = French "Saint Jacques" = English "Saint James the Great".
Not really an alternate. I did the Camino de Santiago from vezelay and it was along roadways for the most part. Some beautiful, out of the way roadways, but still roadways. This trail network seems much more in the wilderness, considering they recommend bivouacing along it.
Me too! Had a little less time than I'd have liked, so I started in Burgos instead of St Jean Pied de Port. Nonetheless, it was an amazing experience. Finisterre might have been one of the prettiest places I've ever been to.
The pictures are beautiful, but what about the logistics? Ideally, day stages with lodging and/or public transport at the ends, such as German trails often have. Wild camping is not allowed in France, so a mere gpx trail through the middle of nowhere isn't that useful all by itself.
For others who didn’t know bivouac is camping without any sort of tent or shelter. In terms of doing a long hike this seems completely unrealistic because you can’t rule out bad weather.
Not allowed, but certainly tolerated. I camped in many an apple tree nursery for months in France, with only a few drunken teens joining me. The gypsy camps were also very accommodating. You could find safe enough places in the middle of Paris to set up a tent.
That is not true. It is disallowed in some cases (though these cases involve things like close to listed buildings, which can be quite difficult to know without some research). The country is also covered with camping sites, and refuges in the mountains.
Maybe they drastically increased monitoring but my memories of my teenage years are that you could do whatever you wanted, and that was in relatively urbanised areas... so wild camping in the middle of nowhere? No-one will even know.
There's an app for this trail with more information. But I would have expected some info about lodging on the site, just to set expectations, do people walk with tents, or doable without?
I did a part of it last year. You need to walk with your tent, you won't reach a lodging site every night. I think the longest stretch without civilization (no village/town to buy food etc) is 5 days. So you also need to manage. your food and water supply.
The app is very helpful for that as it gives you water, food and lodging information on the trail related to your current position (so for instance you can see that in 10km there is a river/water fountain/grocery store etc.)
The GR20 is epic, walking along ridgelines between crazy weather systems, thunder and high winds on one side, humid tropical updrafts on the other, followed by wild boar saucisson, a hunk of bread and corsican beer at the refuge.
Readit News
Fun fact: the GR trails, and hence this through route, aren’t allowed to be mapped in OpenStreetMap.
The federation that administers them, the FFRP, claims copyright in them as a creative work. French law agrees.
You can see the little red and white trailblazing marks on trees, but you can’t record that information and put it into OSM. If you want a map, you need an FFRP-licensed product.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/France/Itinéraires_pédes...
What would happen if a well meaning editor added those trails though, is there automated removal or would OSM get in trouble?
When I go climbing I have to buy a local guide documenting all the historical climbing spots; the persons that sells the guide are the one that equipped and maintened these historical routes : is it selfishness ?
It's very common near where I live for the agencies who manage trails and other unique spots to opt-out of GPS-enabled maps (like Avenza) and to actively monitor social media to ask that people refrain from naming 'photo opp' locations.
Dead Comment
This is misleading : the GR trails as a whole, named... but I believe all the trails are mapped, they just aren't named or continuous.
See this one for instance : https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/323697041#map=16/48.3484/-...
In the mountains, it can be a problem, more than on the coast.
A GR isn't a geographic object, it is a sequence of trails that has been arbitrarily chosen by the author among all the possible sequences of trails.
It's also apparently illegal to insult the President in France, but why would anyone outside of France care?
On the government site https://www.geoportail.gouv.fr/ one can select "Carte topographique IGN" and the GRs seem to be marked.
Whether the government has a license or they are just the government I don't know. But as an end user I can use them for free. I have not studied the conditions for republication.
Deleted Comment
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L'Hexagone
[1] https://en.hexatrek.com/hiking-trail/hexatrek/the-great-fren...
Yes, that’s a side made up of a mountain range and a coast, but to my eye, it fits way better than the hexagon of https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagone_(France). You can fix that around about any somewhat country whose outline isn’t very elongated such as Germany, Iceland or Poland.
And I’m not the only one. https://archive.wikiwix.com/cache/index2.php?url=https%3A%2F... argues a square or a pentagon are better fits for regular polygons. I would mare the pentagon slightly irregular to get an even better fit.
Covering three sides is exactly the same amount of impressive as covering six sides?
I can imagine the impressiveness isn’t linear with sides, so it doesn’t have to half as impressive, but I would expect some dependence.
Maybe it saturates? So covering three sides is peak impressiveness, and any more sides has no effect?
Although your language leaves open the possibility that covering three sides is more impressive than covering six sides. Not sure why that would be, but maybe three sides is the optimum?
https://www.mountainsandme.ca/tear-overview
Europe always feels really small when examining any single country. I still feel surprised by the idea that you can drive across many of these countries in less than a day.
What a great system.
Also if you like history you probably can visit some castles from different centuries along the way.
But it is true that on the French trail you cannot experience real wilderness where you encounter no humans for days and fear to do a bad encounter with wildlife.
The only wildlife that you'd probably see are ibex/chamois, beavers, vultures/eagles in the mountains, and if you are lucky wild boars, foxes, squirrels, deers, snakes and extremely lucky wolves in the Alps and bears in the Pyrenees.
There is forest, mountains, plains, lakes, deserts, jungles, etc.
Deleted Comment
I note this trail passes through St Jean Pied de Port, and thus could be used as a natural connector to walk across France and Spain.
Two popular starting routes are the towns of Irun for Camino del Norte and St. Jean Pied du Port for Camino Frances, which the Hexatrek pass by.
* https://caminoways.com/camino-del-norte
* https://caminoways.com/camino-frances
If anyone is curious, there are vloggers on YouTube documenting their travels for these.
That is not true. It is disallowed in some cases (though these cases involve things like close to listed buildings, which can be quite difficult to know without some research). The country is also covered with camping sites, and refuges in the mountains.
Maybe they drastically increased monitoring but my memories of my teenage years are that you could do whatever you wanted, and that was in relatively urbanised areas... so wild camping in the middle of nowhere? No-one will even know.
The app is very helpful for that as it gives you water, food and lodging information on the trail related to your current position (so for instance you can see that in 10km there is a river/water fountain/grocery store etc.)