Winter Trails Roundtable March Meeting

Last night the group talking about winter trails issues in Gatineau Park met once again.

Unfortunately due to a combination of reasons (health, travel, competitions, etc.) many members were unable to make it. At first I was concerned that this might be because people were frustrated or disinterested but one of our number had been on the phone with several of those missing and was able to reassure us that interest and commitment was still there. We will be looking for another possible meeting date in April.

Much of the discussion was about communicating between trail users and the NCC (with whom I’ll group Demsis). There was some blue-sky thinking about what might be possible when the NCC revamps its website—imagine an official Gatineau Park website that users could contribute to; at which you could actually tell that staff were taking action based on your input; where your input on trail conditions would add value; from which others could tap into the raw data and develop apps. What about a map like Google maps that you could click to see conditions of a trail, or report your own observations? These were all pretty dreamy discussions and you won’t be seeing them anytime soon, but the point is that they are possible and the NCC was receptive.

One of the things that might be seen sooner is a call for input on which types of data are best collected from users. No one is going to fill in forms with 70 fields so what are the three or five things that would make the biggest difference (don’t answer yet, I’ll tell you when the call goes out).

We also talked about grooming but the value of this talk wasn’t as high as it might have been if we’d had the full group. More to come on that I’m sure.

At earlier meetings we’d talked about trail etiquette; in particular ski vs snowshoe use on appropriate trails. I had a side discussion on this last night. One of the things that came out earlier was how new snowshoe trails that included destinations (Healey, etc.) had been introduced in the northern part of the park but that the south of the park still didn’t have this sort of infrastructure. The thinking being that by offering it not only would it give snowshoers more facilities, but it would make skiers happier by getting snowshoers off the ski trails. Last night’s side conversation left me convinced the NCC is taking these points to heart and trying to work out plans that would advantage both these groups.