Modes of presentation

Every stroll is presented on the screen under an interactive form. Nevertheless, a PDF file is also proposed for downloading. If you do not have Adobe Reader software, download it, it is free. You can then print stroll descriptions with all the integrated information.

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Categories of available information

Activities
The types of outdoor activities are as follows : hiking, mountain bike riding, horse-riding, skiing, and a special focus for the Persons with Reduced Mobility.

Level of difficulty
A scale of five levels of difficulty has been established: easy, quite easy, slightly difficult, difficult, impossible. These levels were determined by the person who had registered the stroll. They correspond to technical difficulties such as the clearing of obstacles (stream, barrier, etc.) or to the hillside steepness. The length of the route is not taken into consideration. So, for family walks, especially with very young children, take into account both the length and the technical difficulty level.

Shape of the routes
Three shapes are distinguished: in buckle, linear or mixed (i.e., association of buckles and linear parts).

Geographic information
The coordinates of a route are given in degrees - minutes - seconds in geodesic system WGS84. For more information about the geodesy in France, we invite you to consult the IGN site (in French) which contains plentiful information presented in a very didactic way.

Waypoints file

The waypoints are are marks recorded on a route and that can be used with CartoExploreur (software to navigate with topographic maps of France) or with a GPS.

Excepted for small strolls, such as city tours, which are not divided into sections (they have no road-book), for every hike, you can download a file of the sections waypoints. This file, in the format PCX5, can be imported in CartoExploreur version 3, and can be also used with a GPS.

Characteristics of the waypoints file
The name of the file matches with the code of the hike followed by the extension .wpt.
The identifiers of waypoints are constituted by the code of the hike followed by a hyphen, and by the number of the section written with two figures. A section is always connected to a unique waypoint, which is the point of departure of the section, excepted for the last section of an opened circuit (e.g. a linear route) that contains two waypoints: the departure and the arrival. By convention, 99 is used as the number of the terminal waypoint.

 

Use of the waypoints file
 

You can import several routes in CartoExploreur version 3. Given that the code of the circuit is unique, every waypoint will have a unique identifier. Therefore, it is easy to distinguish each stroll from all the others! It is not rare that round trips occurred for one or several sections. In such a situation, the last waypoints are stacked over the first ones.
The maximal length of a waypoint identifier is constituted by 13 characters, and it exceeds the maximum length allowed by several GPS. The altitude, which is ignored and noted -9999, can also be badly interpreted by some GPS. To avoid these problems of compatibility, you can use CartoExploreur and modify waypoints before exporting them into a GPS, otherwise you can also modify the file with a word processor before using it (e.g., by keeping only the numbers of sections).

Waypoints precision
In order to made up a hike map, a digitalized map is displayed in the background. This process allows us to know the geographic position of waypoints with the precision of the topographic map and with the precision of the drawing line. We can assert that the precision of waypoints in latitude and longitude is 50 m, and, quite frequently, the error is noticeably lower than 50 m. On the ground, this precision is generally sufficient to locate the intersection of two sections.