About | Washington Trail Conditions

What is Hikeability?

Hikeability combines real hiker trip reports from the Washington Trails Association (WTA) with live weather data to classify trail conditions across Washington State. Instead of reading through dozens of reports, you get a single, up-to-date label telling you whether a trail is safe to hike right now.

The map updates automatically as new reports come in and weather changes — so conditions reflect the latest information, not a report from months ago.

Condition Labels

Every trail is classified into one of three conditions:

Hikeable

Trail is in good condition. Safe and enjoyable for most hikers.

Modest

Trail is passable but has notable challenges — patchy snow, mud, or downed trees. Experienced hikers with proper gear can manage.

Unhikeable

Trail is closed, unsafe, or impassable — deep snow, washed-out sections, or extreme weather.

How It Works

1

Scrape trip reports Recent hiker reports are collected daily from the Washington Trails Association website.

2

Fetch weather data Current trailhead conditions — temperature, snow depth, wind, AQI, and precipitation — are pulled from Open-Meteo.

3

Classify with LLM An NVIDIA Llama 3.1 model reads the reports and weather together and assigns a condition label with a plain-English explanation.

4

Display on the map Results are published to the map. Click any trail to see the full conditions summary, weather, and trail details.

Data Sources

Washington Trails Association Trip reports and hike metadata — distance, elevation gain, region, and trail descriptions.

Open-Meteo Free, open-source weather API providing hourly forecasts, snow depth, AQI, and wind data at trailhead coordinates.

NVIDIA Llama 3.1 Nemotron Large language model used for few-shot classification of trail conditions from unstructured report text.

Google Cloud Storage Stores raw reports, weather data, and model predictions. Serves as the data layer between pipeline runs and the web app.

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