Federal Trails Network 2026

A composite of U.S. federal-agency-managed trails in a single harmonized table:

• U.S. Forest Service — National Forest System Trails (NFST), 82,687 segments
• National Park Service — Public Trails (filtered to publicly-displayable rows), 31,386 segments
• Bureau of Land Management — National GTLF Public Managed Trails, 19,104 segments

Total: 127,619 segments. One row per published trail segment, harmonized schema, recomputed length_miles, and a nts_designation column flagging the 11 National Scenic Trails, 19 National Historic Trails, and National Recreation Trails where applicable.

Data assets

Query examples

How many miles of PCT are within a polygon? (use GeoParquet, not hex)

Which hex cells does the AT pass through?

Do not SUM(length_miles) on the hex asset. Each segment's length_miles is repeated on every hex cell it touches after circumradius buffering, so SUM overcounts by the cell-per-segment factor.

MapLibre

Highlight the National Scenic Trails:

Sources & licensing

• USFS NFST — https://data.fs.usda.gov/geodata/edw/datasets.php (S_USA.TrailNFS_Publish). U.S. federal-government work; public domain.
• NPS Public Trails — https://public-nps.opendata.arcgis.com/, FeatureServer at mapservices.nps.gov/arcgis/rest/services/NationalDatasets/NPS_Public_Trails_Geographic/FeatureServer/0. U.S. federal-government work; public domain. Filtered to DATAACCESS='Unrestricted' AND PUBLICDISPLAY='Public Map Display' to respect agency visibility flags.
• BLM GTLF Public Managed Trails — https://gbp-blm-egis.hub.arcgis.com/datasets/BLM-EGIS::blm-natl-gtlf-public-managed-trails, FeatureServer at services1.arcgis.com/KbxwQRRfWyEYLgp4/arcgis/rest/services/BLM_Natl_GTLF_Public_Managed_Trails/FeatureServer/2. U.S. federal-government work; public domain (with BLM "as is" disclaimer in the dataset license).

Pipeline source: https://github.com/boettiger-lab/data-workflows/tree/main/catalog/trails

Methods

1. USFS GDB downloaded; NPS and BLM FeatureServers paged (2000 rows / page) into single GeoJSONs. Raw cached to s3://public-trails/raw/.
2. All three layers reprojected to EPSG:4326 via ogr2ogr -t_srs EPSG:4326 -lco GEOMETRY_NAME=geometry.
3. Schema harmonized in DuckDB; common columns aliased; admin_agency, nts_designation, source_dataset added.
4. NTS-designation derivation: USFS's NATIONAL_TRAIL_DESIGNATION integer code is mapped (1 = not designated, 2 = NRT, 3 = NST/NHT). For all three sources, trail-name patterns (%PACIFIC CREST%, %CONTINENTAL DIVIDE%, %APPALACHIAN%, etc.) identify the specific named NST/NHT. BLM uses ROUTE_SCNDRY_SPCL_DSGNTN_NM for the canonical designation name, which carries the same patterns.
5. length_miles recomputed by reprojecting to EPSG:5070 (USA Contiguous Albers Equal Area, meters) and dividing ST_Length by 1609.344. CONUS-accurate; AK/HI/PR/VI lengths are approximate.
6. Final GeoParquet written; cng-datasets workflow produced PMTiles + line-buffered H3 hex at native resolution 8.

Caveats

• Line-buffered hex semantics: each line segment is buffered by the H3 res-8 circumradius before polyfill. A hex row means "a trail passes near this cell" not "within". Good for presence/access queries; not for distance/miles queries.
• NPS public-display filter removes segments the agency has marked as not for public release (sensitive resources, trail closures, etc.). Counts will be lower than the raw FeatureServer response.
• NTS designation is derived from trail-name patterns and the USFS NATIONAL_TRAIL_DESIGNATION numeric code. The 11 National Scenic Trails are matched by name; non-PCT/AT-class connectors that share part of an NST name may be tagged with that NST's code (rare).
• No BLM: see scope note above.

Roadmap

• v2: incorporate BLM trails when a unified source is identified
• v2: split into per-NST sibling collections if downstream apps want them separately