Terms and privacy

Last updated November 14, 2026. (Return to the homepage.)

Who runs Hiker Atlas

Hiker Atlas is a free hobby project by Colin Dellow. You can reach me at [email protected]. Its code is on GitHub.

No warranty

Hiker Atlas is offered as is, with no warranty of any kind. I'm not liable for anything that happens from using it, as far as the law allows.

Hiking is risky: you're responsible for your own safety

• Hiking has inherent risks. You're responsible for your own safety when you're outdoors.
• Hiker Atlas isn't a substitute for experience. It doesn't replace the experience, skills, gear and judgement to keep yourself safe. Check conditions, closures and the weather before you go, and turn back when you should.
• Maps can be wrong. They're drawn from public sources, chiefly OpenStreetMap, that may be inaccurate or out of date. Trails and conditions on the ground may not match the map. The suggested hikes are picked by a computer, not walked by me, and times, distances and difficulty are estimates.

Things you post are public

Hiker Atlas's community features, like faving a hike and (in future) reviews and GPS tracks, work through your AT Protocol account: the same kind of account as Bluesky.

• Your posts live in your account, not on Hiker Atlas's servers. Each fave, review or track is saved as a public record in your own account, on your account's server (your PDS), and anyone can see it, here or in any other app. Your profile page here (/people/your.handle) just reads it from there.
• You can delete them, in Hiker Atlas (tap the heart again to unfave) or directly through your account's server. As on any public network, copies other services made while a record was public may outlive its deletion.
• Signing in happens at your account's server (Bluesky's, for most people). Hiker Atlas never sees your password. It asks only to write its own kinds of record (com.hikeratlas.*) and to upload files (GPS tracks and photos), not to read your messages or post as you elsewhere.

What you post is yours

• You keep ownership of the reviews, photos and tracks you post. Posting doesn't hand over your rights; it grants the licences below.
• Only post what you have the right to post: your own words, photos and tracks. Take care with photos of other people.
• Hiker Atlas may always display and process what you post with its record types: show it on Hiker Atlas, and use it to work out things like which route a track follows or what a hike's conditions are. This licence is worldwide and free, and lasts while the post exists.
• You also choose what everyone else may do with it. Your choice is a setting in your Hiker Atlas profile, and each post records the choice it was made with, so changing it later only affects new posts:
  • Public domain (CC0), the default: anyone may use it for anything, with no conditions. This is what builds a commons of trail knowledge that anyone can reuse, including OpenStreetMap's mappers.
  • CC BY 4.0: anyone may use it for anything, as long as they credit you.
  • Hiker Atlas only: no one else gets a licence from you. Your posts are still public records anyone can see, but others may only use them as the law allows without permission.
• Deleting a post stops new use by Hiker Atlas. It can't recall copies others already made under CC0 or CC BY, which can't be withdrawn once given.

Privacy

• No accounts, no analytics. Hiker Atlas has no accounts of its own and doesn't use analytics or tracking cookies.

• Your sign-in stays in your browser. Signing in keeps a session in your browser (IndexedDB), and only there. Signing out removes it.

• A few settings are kept in your browser (local storage): your recent searches, and whether you turned on aerial imagery. They never leave your device.

• The services the site uses see the usual details of each request, like your IP address and browser:

  • Hiker Atlas's hosting (Cloudflare) serves the site, its maps and its routes.
  • Search goes to Hiker Atlas's search service (on Amazon Web Services). It sends what you typed and roughly where the map is (to about 100 m), to rank nearby results first.
  • Terrain comes from Mapterhorn. Aerial imagery, if you turn it on, comes from EOX, the USGS, and the governments of Ontario, Quebec and Saskatchewan. The map loads a script from unpkg, and fonts come from Google Fonts.
  • "Directions to the trailhead" opens Google Maps.

  Hiker Atlas doesn't combine or keep these details beyond its providers' ordinary logs.

Changes

If these terms change, this page will say so, with a new date. Questions? Email [email protected].