Updates

The Arapuni no dogs verdict now rests on the council's bylaw as well as the Trust's own words. When we corrected that walk yesterday we said plainly that we could not read South Waikato District Council's Dog Control Bylaw 2017 from the council's site, so we were not resting the verdict on it. We have read it now. Its Second Schedule lists, under Prohibited Dog Areas - District Wide, “01 Waikato River Trails”, and clause 7.4 says the owner or person in control of a dog “shall not take that dog into or allow that dog to be in any prohibited dog area”. Kellie's report and the Trust's FAQ had already settled it. This just means the answer no longer depends on where exactly the trail starts at the bridge.

Tirau Domain Walk had an inferred verdict, and now it has the council's own. An inference is the weakest evidence we publish, so while we had the bylaw open we checked this one. On lead is right, and the schedule adds something useful: the council designates “Tirau Domain Area - Lower” a dog exercise area, where a dog is allowed off the lead under control. It publishes no boundary for the lower section and this walk covers more of the domain than that, so the walk stays marked on lead rather than promising off lead ground we cannot point to. The page now says so.

One to know if you are heading to the Blue Spring. The same schedule prohibits dogs on the Te Waihou Walkway across the whole district. We do not list that walk, and now we will not list it as anything but no dogs. We also checked every other walk we hold in the corridor between Karapiro and Atiamuri: none of them sit on the Waikato River Trails, so Arapuni was the only one affected.

A photo we hold because a child is in frame now tells you it is held. We never publish a photo with a child in it without James looking at it himself, and that is not changing. What was wrong is that the wait was silent: your upload sat marked pending and nothing said what it was waiting on, or for how long. It mattered more than it looks, because a photo is what verifies a walk, so a picture held on privacy quietly held the walk log with it. From now on you get a message the moment it happens, saying it is with James, that it takes a day or two, and whether your walk is waiting on it as well. Approving a photo has always sent word and so has declining one. Holding one should have too.

Lake Moananui has off lead ground, and our page never said so. Jim Higgins Memorial Walkway circles the lake in Tokoroa, and we had it on lead on nothing but an inference. The council's own Tokoroa dog map and the bylaw's Second Schedule both name “West side of Lake Moananui” a designated dog exercise area, where a dog is allowed off the lead while it stays under control, and the map calls the east side a leashed area in as many words. The loop takes in both shores, so it stays marked on lead for the route as a whole, but the page now tells you which side is which. The playground by the lake is no dogs at any time, and where a playground is unfenced the council asks for 10 metres of clearance. We checked Tokoroa to Colsons Hill Lookout while we had the map open: on lead is right there too, and it now cites the council instead of our guess.

The Lowry Bay Loop is on the site, and we had the wrong council on it first time round. Melanie sent in this short steep climb behind Lowry Bay and told us it was on lead, and we agreed with her but for the wrong reason: we read it as part of Greater Wellington's East Harbour Regional Park and quoted the Northern Forest rule at her. The tracks are actually in Francis Bell Reserve, which is Hutt City ground, so it is the city's Dog Control Bylaw 2025 that governs. We read its Schedule Two of Dog Exercise Areas right through, all 39 of them, from Stokes Valley down to three separate Eastbourne entries on the same coast. Lowry Bay is not in the list and neither is Francis Bell Reserve, so no exception applies and the lead stays on. Same answer, better reason, and the page says which one it is. The walk itself is 3 km with about 220 m of climbing, up the Cheviot Road Track and back down the Dillon Street branch, and the page carries two things Melanie flagged: the steep steps at the Dillon Street end, and a second 55 m climb on the way down that the profile shows and nobody expects. She also asked us to pass on that she met an off lead dog on these tracks that was not under control and went for Donna, who is reactive, so that is on the page too.

Six East Harbour walks around Eastbourne now cite the park's own dog rules, not our inference. Butterfly Creek Track, the Butterfly Creek picnic area walk, the Main Ridge Track from Bus Barn to Lowry Bay, both Muritai Park loops and the Lowry Trig climb from Ferry Road were all marked on lead on nothing better than an inference from the track data. Greater Wellington publishes a dog rules map for East Harbour Regional Park, and its Northern Forest panel is a single zone with one legend entry, Dogs on leads. The map names Butterfly Creek picnic area, Bus Barn Track, the Main Ridge Track, Muritai Park Track and Lowry trig inside that boundary, so all six now carry the council's own wording and a link to it. The answer has not changed, on lead was right. What changed is that you can now see who says so. Worth knowing while you are there: the same map bans dogs entirely at Baring Head and the Parangarahu Lakes, and we list no walk in either.

Four more Eastbourne and Wainuiomata walks now cite that same map. The dog rules map names about eighteen tracks and we had only followed up the six we published yesterday, so we went back through the rest. Ferry Road Track and Kaitawa Road Track sit wholly inside the Northern Forest block, and Lees Grove Track and Lees Grove Loop Track do too once you are off the road end, so all four carry Greater Wellington's words now instead of our inference. The answer on every one of them is still on lead, which is what we already had. Rata Ridge Circuit is named on the map as well, but half of that 13 km loop runs through Wainuiomata streets rather than the park, so the map cannot speak for the whole walk and we have left it alone until we can source both halves properly.

Rata Ridge Circuit said Dogs allowed, and it should have said on lead. It was the last East Harbour walk still running on an inference, and it was the one worth getting to, because an inference had it reading more permissive than either landholder actually is. Greater Wellington's East Harbour Regional Park dog rules map names the Zigzag Track and the Rata Ridge Track inside the Northern Forest, and the only legend entry on that block is Dogs on leads. Yesterday we left this one alone because half of the 13 km loop is not in the park at all, and a map that names a track does not govern ground it does not cover. So we checked the other half properly: the northern arm drops out of the park onto Hutt City ground and comes home through Wainuiomata on Brian Morgan Terrace and Wainuiomata Road, where the council's rule is that dogs are on lead in every public place unless it is a listed dog exercise area. None of this route is on that list. On lead the whole way round, now from both landholders instead of from nobody.

Walks sent in by members never said what shape they were, and 88 of them do now. LJ asked whether her Navy Fields lap should be a loop, ending back at the roundabout it starts from. It should, and it does: the line she recorded closes 9 m from where it began. The page just never said so. Every one of the 238 walks members have sent us shipped with the shape field empty, so none of them carried a Route line and none of them turned up under the Loop filter on the walks list. We now read the shape off the walk's own name and its recorded line, and only claim one when the two agree, which gives 33 loops and 55 that run point to point. The rest stay blank on purpose. A line that finishes where it started can just as easily be a there and back, and we would rather say nothing than tell you the wrong one.

We had the Arapuni Suspension Bridge Walk marked dogs welcome and off lead, and dogs are not allowed there. Kellie reported it and she is right. The Waikato River Trails Trust answers it in its own FAQ: “Dogs are not allowed on the Trails for the safety of Trail users and adjacent farmers with the exception of the 1.5 kms from the Mangakino Lakefront to the end of the Mangakino golf course.” That exception is at Mangakino, about 50 km up the river. Worth saying where our version came from, because it is the part we got wrong rather than the part we missed: the off lead verdict rode in on a dog friendly tag from the listing we imported the walk from, not from anyone who manages the land. The one honest wrinkle is that nobody publishes exactly where the trail starts at the bridge, and the Trust's own Karapiro page reads as though the bridge sits beside the trail rather than on it. With stock and farmers as the Trust's reason, we took the restrictive reading. Checking it turned up something else worth knowing: Mercury has closed the western end of the swing bridge and shut Arapuni Road across the dam from 1 September for 24 to 36 months, so the crossing this walk is named for is not a through route at the moment. The listing itself has come down, which is what we do with a walk a dog cannot go on, so the walk no longer appears in the Waikato results.

Kowai Pass Domain at Springfield is drawn and live, and we should not have asked Steph to go and walk it with a phone. She sent it in on Sunday with a rough outline and an apology for having no GPS, and we replied that nothing inside the domain was mapped anywhere, so hers was the only accurate line in the world. That was wrong. Selwyn District Council's own open space asset register had the path all along, a 2.8 metre metalled corridor it files under Rewi Alley Memorial, and the line came straight off it: 1 km each way from the Domain Road gate out to the memorial, so about 2.1 km there and back, or a loop if you come home along the road. Steph called it Ruru Alley, which is what let us find it, and Rewi Alley was born in Springfield. Flat, sheltered, easy, with the playground and tennis courts at the trailhead. The lead stays on: the council's board at the gate shows a dog on lead and Steph confirms it from the ground. Kowai Pass Domain

Balmoral Fire Lookout now says what DOC actually told Inge, in writing. Our page said the Arthur's Pass visitor centre had told us on the phone that a dog on a lead is fine up there. Inge had asked them herself on 30 August and a ranger wrote back, “Yes you can have a dog on a lead there.” She sent that on to us and the page carries it now. The verdict has not changed and is still a DOC permit, because a one to one email does not rewrite DOC's published rule for everyone else, but it does mean the office is on record and Arthur's Pass is who you ask. Pip is on the walk now too, sitting above the braided Hurunui with the Amuri Plain behind her. Balmoral Fire Lookout

Julie’s Valley Views loop in Palmerston North is drawn and live, and we owe her a correction with it. She sent it in on 30 August and we spent five replies asking her questions, ending with a request that she go and record the route on her phone. She did not need to: the whole loop was mapped in public data the entire time, and we had been looking at the wrong corridor. Palmerston North publishes a Turitea Green Corridor Walkway, but that is a different walk about 1.5 km south, and reading our own page for it made Julie’s return leg look like it did not exist. Her loop links two short green corridors along the Turitea Stream with Turitea Road and Valley Views Road: 3.5 km, 45 minutes, which is the exact time she gave us. The correction is on the lead. We told her the lead stays on throughout and that was wrong. The council’s Dog Control Policy 2024 names “Turitea Stream Esplanade Reserves (Green Corridors)” as a dog exercise area at clause 20(o), so Benji is off lead on both corridor legs and back on for the two roads. One thing to know before you go: the Turitea corridor ends in a flight of gravel steps up to Valley Views Road, so this one is not a pram walk. Valley Views Loop

A flat lap of the Navy fields in Devonport is drawn and live. LJ and Pepper sent it in with a recorded GPS line: a 2.9 km loop around the Ngātaringa sports fields with the Harbour Bridge across the water on the western side, past Te Taua Moana Marae, and nine of the old exercise stations still standing. LJ called it a level 30 minute walk and we make it 35, with 17 m of climbing in the whole circuit. The lead stays on: none of the ground this loop covers is on Auckland Council's off-leash list for Devonport-Takapuna, so the council's default on-leash rule governs it. The stricter rule is the one worth knowing before you arrive, because this walk is a lap of the fields: dogs are prohibited on any playground or sports surface outright. We checked LJ's recorded line against every playing surface on the site and it runs the perimeter the whole way without crossing one, so the route and the rule agree. Navy Fields and Harbour Bridge View

The Wharfedale Track was 3.3 km longer on our page than it is on the ground. DOC hands the track over in three pieces, and one of them is a 5 m fragment of the junction where the other two meet. Our stitcher had no way to recognise a piece that belongs in the middle rather than on an end, so it welded that fragment onto the finish and drew a straight line 3.3 km back across the Oxford Forest. The page said 17.4 km, 4h 12m and Expert. DOC's own measurement of the track is 14.2 km, and we now make it 14.1 km, 3h 20m and Hard. The steepest grade on the page was 315 percent, which is a cliff, not a track: it is 29 percent. The fix is in the stitcher too, so a piece that touches the middle of a route is dropped rather than welded to an end, and there is now a check that lists every track whose line jumps back onto itself. Wharfedale Track

The Hellyers Creek Path in Beach Haven is drawn and live. JC and Elio sent it in as a loop out of Shepherds Park, down onto the Hellyers Creek Foreshore Reserve Walkway and back to the car park by road, and put it at about 3.5 km. We make it 3.3 km, so his eye was good. Two things his report did not have. Auckland Council uses the name Hellyers Creek Path for a longer 6.0 km route from 120 Beach Haven Road, so the page says plainly that this is the shorter car park loop and where to keep going for the full one. And the lead rule is narrower than he thought: Hellyers Creek Reserve is an off-leash reserve, but the council carves out “the foreshore and associated mangrove areas” as on-leash at all times, and the walkway runs the foreshore end to end. Shepherds Park at the start is off-leash except on the playground and the sports fields, where dogs are not allowed at all. On lead for the walk, off for a run around the park after it. Hellyers Creek Path from Shepherds Park

We told people not to take a dog past Browning Bivouac, and DOC says that was out of date. We had the Styx Valley legs down as closed to dogs because DOC's own track records marked them No Dogs, and the Top Crawford Hut to Browning Bivouac page said so. David Soper, Principal Ranger Biodiversity for DOC's Hokitika District, wrote back to tell us those records should read dogs by permit only, that DOC changed where dogs are allowed in the Hokitika District fairly recently, and that some historic information is still on their website waiting to be fixed. The page now says that. He also raised something we were not showing anyone: the bridges. Some river and creek crossings through that country are hard or impossible on foot after rain, and the way over is a swingbridge or a three wire. Some dogs will not walk a swingbridge and no dog is crossing a three wire, and he has had trampers turn back at one. That is on the page too.

The Ngatiawa Road end to Kapakapanui Hut track is redrawn, and it is 2 km shorter than we said. Kellie spotted that the outline ran out to the hut and then shot back to the start in one straight line. She was right, and the line was hiding a real error: we stated 6.9 km, but 2,154 m of that was a jump across the valley that nobody walks. The track is 4.7 km, from the Ngatiawa Road end up to the hut, climbing 698 m. The cause was ours. DOC hands this track over in pieces, and our stitching only ever joined a piece onto the end of the line, never onto the front, so the piece that leads into the road end got welded on after the hut instead of before the start. That is fixed for every track we draw this way, not just this one. The page also said the walk drops 730 m and hits a 507 per cent gradient, both of which were the false line rather than the hill. On the other half of her report, the three Kapakapanui walks are genuinely different: this one stops at the hut, Mount Kapakapanui from Ngatiawa Road carries on to the summit, and the Circuit is the full round. The redrawn line makes that a lot easier to see.

Balmoral Fire Lookout is on the map. Inge sent this one in on 28 August and we had to hold it, because nobody had drawn the track and we will not plot a walk by guessing at where it goes. Somebody has mapped it since, so here it is: 1.4 km up an old 4WD road from the stile on Hurunui Bluff Road, 2.9 km return, 123 m of climb, and at the top the only remaining timber fire lookout in Canterbury, built in 1939 and open to walk into. Dogs need a DOC permit, and we have been straight on the page about why. We told Inge in August that a dog on a lead was fine, on the strength of a phone answer from the Arthur’s Pass visitor centre. That answer is not published anywhere, DOC’s written rule for conservation land is that pets need their permission, and the written rule wins. Arthur’s Pass is the office to ask, and going by that call they are likely to say yes.

Two Picton walks were wrongly closed to dogs. Inge reported that dogs are allowed on lead on the Queen Charlotte View Track and sent Marlborough District Council’s own page to prove it. She is right, and the annoying part is that we already knew: The Snout View Track has carried a checked on-lead correction quoting that council for weeks, and its page still said “No dogs”. The cause was ours. Councils give us their dog rules as mapped zones, and the zone here is drawn around the whole of Victoria Domain, where the council prohibits the mountain bike tracks and the open ground but allows dogs on lead on “the roadways and formed walking tracks”. Our code let that one coarse polygon overrule a rule we had read and checked by hand, which is the wrong way round. It no longer can. We matched every point of both routes against the tracks they actually run on: both are out and back on formed walking track and neither touches a mountain bike descent. Both pages now say on lead, quote the council in full and explain why the walk sits outside the zone. Stay on the walking track on the way down, because the bike descents really are closed to dogs.

Dudding Lake takes dogs, and now says so. Inge stayed at this little campground north of Marton and asked whether we cover camping grounds with no rooms to rent. We do, and this one was already in our data with its dog policy blank, which is why it had never shown up. Their own site is clear: “The lake is dog friendly, but dogs must be restrained at busy times and not bother other lake users.” That restraint is their condition, so the page carries it as a lead rule in their words rather than ours. Rangitikei District Council owns the reserve and a caretaker runs the camp, there are powered and non-powered sites for tents, campervans and caravans, and no rental accommodation, so it passes the test Inge was asking about. Two things we have deliberately left off. Their listing came to us named “Duddings Lake Holiday Park”, which is neither the spelling nor the sort of place it is, so we use the name the people running it use. And Inge mentioned dogs swimming in the lake: the operator says nothing either way, and the lake is monitored weekly for toxic algae through summer, so we are not turning that into a claim on a page.

515 hut notes reworded. Open any of the 527 DOC huts and bivvies on the map and there is a line telling you where dogs stand there. Nearly all of them joined two thoughts with a long dash, which is not how we write anywhere else on the site. They are now proper sentences: "On Ruahine Forest Park. Dog access here is not formally stated by DOC. There is no declared dog ban or permit rule we can confirm. Check with the local DOC office before you go." Nothing about any verdict changed, only the punctuation and the capital letters after it.

The reason it lasted so long is the more useful fix. We run an automatic copy check on every build, and it reads the pages and the data files the site is built with. The huts, cafes, dog parks and walking routes do not come through there. They are served to the map from a separate store, so the check had never once looked at them. It does now, and it caught three more on its first run: a start point on Cone Creek Hut, and two cafe lines, including The Beer Engine at Titahi Bay. All fixed, and the same mistake cannot come back quietly.

Six dog parks were hiding the rule that matters. A lot of our dog park records were snapshotted at a fixed length years ago, and on 94 of them the cut landed inside the restriction itself. Fortune Reserve in Mairehau said "dogs may be off leash in the fenced dog park but " and then stopped, when the council's next words are "are prohibited from within 1m of the playground". Glenmark Reserve at Waipara stopped at "prohibited from within ten metres of the playg". We went back to each council's own page and put the whole rule back on Fortune Reserve, Glenmark Reserve, Rotorua Racecourse, Beachlands Domain, Luckens Reserve and Devonport Domain. No verdict moved, but you can now read the condition you are being asked to keep.

395 walk pages said “takes about about 7 min”. When a walk's timing comes from our own reckoning rather than the source's own words, we write it as “about 7 min”, which is right when the number stands on its own. Three sentences on the walk page then put a second “about” in front of it, so the page, the summary Google shows in search results and the structured data behind it all read “about about”. The timings themselves were never wrong, only the wording around them, and it now reads the way it always should have.

The map now brings itself back. Nicolas told us that zooming in on Edge broke his map and the only way out was to reload the page. His screenshot was the whole answer: the walk list, the panels and every button were still there and working, and only the map itself had gone white. That is the browser taking away the graphics context the map draws with, which Windows machines do under memory pressure and then often never hand back. We already had code waiting for it to come back, so on his machine nothing happened and all he ever got was a message telling him to refresh. The map now waits four seconds, and if the graphics context has not returned it reloads the page for him and puts the map back exactly where he was looking. On a machine that cannot hold the map at all it stops after two goes and says so plainly, instead of reloading again and again.

The Konini Pack Track, Reefton to Blacks Point, is drawn. Somebody dropped an anonymous pin on this one back on 29 August and it has taken until now to draw, because the two OSM ways carrying the name sit 563 m apart and it read as unmappable. The piece joining them turned out to be a track with no name on it at all, so the route stitches end to end after all: 3.6 km from the edge of Reefton over the ridge to Blacks Point, a little over 400 m of climb, and it links into the Murray Creek network at the far end. Dogs need a DOC permit from the Māwhera / Greymouth office. DOC publishes no page for this track and does not list it in the Reefton Walks brochure, so rather than guess we probed DOC’s conservation land layer at 17 points along the line: reserve land at the town end, Victoria Forest Park for the rest, all of it conservation land where a dog needs permission. The page says all of that out loud.

Four of Ace's walks now have a photo on them. Toni sent in a set from around the Waikato and Taupō, and they are live on Lake Hakanoa Walkway, Maukutea Beach, the Great Lake Trail Headland Loop and the Chinamen's Creek section. The Headland Loop one has Ace standing at the trail junction sign, which is about as good as walk evidence gets.

Dexter is now on two Central Otago walks. Ashley sent photos from Gabriels Gully and the Basin View Short Track, both taken on 5 September, and they are up on those pages.