# What the mountain modes can honestly show

A coverage audit run before building *I'm hiking!* and *I'm skiing!* properly,
against the live APIs on 22 August 2026. Every figure below was measured, not
inferred from documentation.

The question it answers: **is the data there for every canton?** The short
answer is that the *transport* half is uniformly there and the *terrain* half
is not — and the gaps are specific enough to design around rather than
discover halfway.

## The transport half: yes, everywhere

The Open Journey Planner is the reliable lift inventory. Lift stops within 6 km
of a resort centre, each checked for a live departure board, in **August**:

| Place | Canton | Stops | Lift stops | Running today |
|---|---|---:|---:|---|
| Engelberg | OW | 40 | 7 | Brunni-Bahnen, Talst. Kabinenb., Titlis |
| Adelboden | BE | 40 | 4 | Tschentenbahn, Silleren, Sillerenbahn |
| Andermatt | UR | 29 | 6 | Gondelbahn Gütsch, Nätschen, Gütsch |
| Villars-sur-Ollon | VD | 40 | 2 | télécabine, La Barboleuse |
| Leysin | VD | 40 | 4 | station aval, Tête d'Aï, Berneuse |
| Scuol | GR | 40 | 3 | pendicularas, Motta Naluns, Prui |
| Airolo | TI | 20 | 3 | Pesciüm, Sasso della Boggia |
| Weggis (lakeside) | LU | 40 | 4 | Luftseilbahn, Rigi Kaltbad |
| Brienz (lakeside) | BE | 40 | 4 | Brienz BRB, Giessbach, Planalp |
| Col du Grand-St-Bernard | VS | 4 | 0 | — a bus pass, correctly |
| Appenzell | AI | 34 | 0 | nearest lift is at Wasserauen, ~7 km |

Cable cars and rack railways are ordinary journeys with ordinary calls, so
everything the plugin already does — departure boards, routes drawn on the map,
following one — works on them unchanged.

**Closure is readable, and distinguishable from an error.** A lift not running
today answers `ok=false` with `StopEventProblemType` rather than an empty list.
Asked again for a date in season it answers normally: Davos Jakobshorn returns
nothing today and four departures from 10:00 on 15 January 2027. So "closed
now, runs in winter" is answerable at the cost of one probe request.

*Note for the implementation:* the panel currently treats `ok=false` as a
network failure and raises the error banner. In a mode where half the lifts are
seasonally shut that is wrong, and it is the first thing to change.

## The terrain half: partly

### Ski touring — rich, where routes exist

`ch.swisstopo-karto.skitouren` is queryable and carries a full record:

    target_name        Vermigelhütte
    target_altitude    2042
    name_de/fr/it/en   Von Andermatt
    difficulty_*       L / F / F / F        (SAC ski scale, four languages)
    ascent_time_label  03:00 h
    ascent_altitude    600
    url_sac_*          the SAC route portal, four languages

Present at Andermatt (5 routes), Airolo (4), Col du Grand-St-Bernard (3), Col
de la Forclaz (3), Scuol (1). **Absent at Engelberg, Adelboden, Villars and
Leysin** — these are *touring* routes, so they exist where touring happens, not
where lift-served skiing does. Some features carry a placeholder record reading
"Pas d'info itinéraire disponible", so coverage is partial even inside a
covered area.

### Hiking — the official network only

`ch.astra.wanderland` returns named, numbered routes and their stage endpoints:

    chmobil_title         Via Alpina (Altdorf (UR) - Engelberg)
    chmobil_route_number  1
    chmobil_has_segment   true

Present at all twelve places tested except Weggis. But it is the SchweizMobil
*official* network — national, regional and local numbered routes — not every
footpath. The full footpath network is `ch.swisstopo.swisstlm3d-wanderwege`,
which is **raster only**: it can be drawn, never queried.

Summer routes carry no length, time or altitude. `ch.astra.winterwanderwege`
does carry all of it — name, number, length, ascent, descent, minutes and the
itinerary in words — but exists at only three of the twelve places.

### Altitude — yes, anywhere

`api3.geo.admin.ch/rest/services/height` answers for any point, but wants LV95
rather than WGS84. swisstopo's documented approximation converts offline, so
the projection costs no request: checked against Lake Brienz, which came back
563.7 m against an official 564 m, and Jungfraujoch at 3469 m.

## What is not there at all

These are worth stating plainly because the obvious feature descriptions imply
them:

- **Downhill piste names.** Of 880 layers in the federal catalogue, exactly two
  mention lifts and **none** covers marked pistes. The winter national map
  (`ch.swisstopo.pixelkarte-farbe-winter`) *draws* pistes and lifts, as pixels;
  there is nothing behind them to query. Piste names, difficulty colours and
  open/closed status belong to the individual resorts, and are not open data.
- **Mountain restaurants.** No federal POI layer.
  `ch.bfs.erreichbarkeit-restaurants` is an accessibility statistic, not a
  list of places to eat.
- **SAC huts as such.** `ch.swisstopo.unterkuenfte-winter` sounds like the hut
  network and is not: it returned nothing at Vermigelhütte, Vignettes,
  Rotondohütte or Berneuse, and at Engstlenalp and Kleine Scheidegg it returned
  hotels. Huts do appear — as the *targets* of ski-touring routes, with their
  altitude and an SAC link — which is a different and narrower thing.
- **A complete lift register from the map services.**
  `ch.bav.seilbahnen-bundeskonzession` covers only federally-licensed
  cableways: it names Davos–Höhenweg and Zermatt–Sunnegga, and returns **zero**
  at Engelberg, Villars and Leysin, where the planner lists seven, two and four
  lift stops. Useful for naming an installation, useless as an inventory.

## What this means for the two modes

**I'm skiing!** can honestly be: every lift around you with its live departures
and its closure state, the lift lines drawn, the ski-touring routes with their
SAC difficulty, ascent time and altitude gain, and the hut or summit each one
leads to. It cannot name a marked piste, and the panel should say so rather
than let the winter map's pixels imply otherwise.

**I'm hiking!** can honestly be: the official numbered routes with their stage
endpoints, the full footpath network drawn underneath, the altitude of any
point you touch, and the transport that reaches the trailhead — which is the
part that already works and is the part a walker actually needs.

The one design change both modes need: stops are currently sampled across the
view *regardless of mode*, so at Davos six sampled stops might include two
lifts. In a mountain mode the sampling has to prefer stops of the modes being
shown, or the map of lifts will mostly be buses.