Every trail on every outdoor map was walked by somebody. Every crag was named, every approach was figured out the hard way, every parking lot was found by someone who got it wrong twice first. That knowledge got typed into platforms that kept it. This is the reset: an open commons that credits you by name, and pays you when your work carries a guide someone sold.
No account needed to look around. You only sign in when you save.
A wrangler contributes the layer everything else is drawn on top of. It is not writing, and it is not a guide — it is the ground truth other people's guides stand on.
A crag, a boulder, a trailhead, a viewpoint, a wilderness boundary, a seasonal closure. Click it onto the map in 2D or fly the globe in 3D and place it against real terrain. Points, paths and areas — a raptor closure is a polygon, not a sentence buried in a paragraph.
Drop in the GPX, KML, KMZ or CSV sitting in your downloads folder. Named waypoints become places; the track becomes a path. A zip of tracks is how agencies ship data, and it is how a decade of your own recorded approaches gets in here in one go instead of one click at a time.
Shared data feeds other people's guides, so a commons photo has to show the terrain: approach, parking, signage, the route itself. Everything is screened before it lands. Anything else belongs in your own guide, where nothing is filtered for topic.
Which gate is locked in spring. Where the trail braids and which braid is the real one. Paste a block of titles and descriptions and they are matched to your places by name, in bulk, rather than one form at a time.
The reason the last generation of outdoor platforms felt like a bad trade is that it was one. Here the terms are written down.
Every place you contribute carries your attribution wherever it appears, including inside guides you had nothing to do with. Contribution is a byline, not an upload.
Commons data is royalty-eligible: when a creator sells a guide built on places you contributed, that is revenue you share in. Free guides stay free and cost you nothing — the commons is not a paywall.
Everything you draw starts private. It joins the commons when you publish it, and not a moment earlier — so you can map a whole area over a month of evenings and release it when it is actually right.
There is no tier that unlocks the drawing tools. Pro is for people publishing and selling guides; adding to the map is not something we would ever charge you for.
If you are the person other people text when they want to know where something is, you are already doing this job unpaid.
The print run sold out and the coordinates live in a spreadsheet. Put the places on a real map, keep your name on them, and let the guides people actually build cite you.
Access notes, closures and stewardship boundaries belong somewhere structured, not in a PDF from 2019 and a pinned Facebook post. Closures are shapes here, with dates.
You already ship data as a zip of tracks. Import it whole, keep it authoritative and current, and have it reach people in the place they are actually looking — the map they opened at the trailhead.
Open the Wrangler and click one place onto the map. It stays on your screen whether or not you ever make an account — you only sign in at the point where you want to keep it.