Have a tag to denote fictional "pathless paths" that exist only for routing purposes?

Here is the same area in the Strava global heatmap:

It’s often possible to see where people actually walk on the heatmap (which is available for mapping) even when it isn’t possible to see this on the ground. The traces on the heatmap can be “averaged” to draw the approximate line of travel.

Mapping everything off the heatmap has its dangers. I’ve seen pathless routes over glaciers that need special gear mapped as highway=path with no other tags. I wouldn’t recommend this!

But for somewhere you have walked yourself and where you can add appropriate tags such as surface, sac_scale and trail_visibility, cross checking with the heatmap can give better results than just using your own GPX track.

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