About Trailhead South

Trailhead South is a directory of outdoor recreation spots across eleven Southern states: Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and North Carolina. We track seven kinds of places: waterfalls, primitive and backcountry camping, river access and boat ramps, trailheads, scenic overlooks, historic sites, and alligator viewing spots.

What we're not

This is a v1 build. There are no user accounts, no reviews, no submissions, and no search yet. We don't list Buc-ee's locations, and we only cover the eleven states above. If you're looking for Virginia or Kentucky, this isn't the site yet.

Where the data comes from

Almost everything on this site is pulled from OpenStreetMap, the crowdsourced, editable map used by everyone from Craigslist to the US government. OSM data is licensed under the Open Database License (ODbL): map data is © OpenStreetMap contributors, and we credit that on every page.

The one exception is alligator viewing spots. Those aren't reliably tagged in OSM, so that category is a small, hand-checked editorial list rather than a bulk data pull. Everything else, including waterfalls, campsites, river access, trailheads, overlooks, and historic sites, comes from querying OSM's Overpass API for the relevant tags in each state, then running that raw data through a cleanup pass.

What the cleanup pass does

OSM data is only as good as whoever last mapped a spot, which means it's inconsistent. Before anything goes on the site, we:

• Drop duplicate entries. The same feature mapped twice within about 150 meters gets merged into one listing.
• Drop unnamed features in most categories, since an unlabeled dot on a map isn't useful. The two exceptions are trailheads and river access points, which often lack a formal name in OSM but are still worth knowing about. Those get a generated name (from the operator or nearest named feature) and are flagged as unnamed.
• For primitive camping, keep only sites that are actually primitive: backcountry-designated, tagged as basic or informal, or explicitly free. Developed pay campgrounds get filtered out, since that's not what this category is for.
• For river access, combine boat ramps (slipways) and canoe/kayak put-ins into one category, since from a "where do I put a boat in the water" standpoint they answer the same question.

The richness score

Every listing gets a richness score from 0 to 10, one point for each practical detail we have on file: fee, parking, water, toilets, access rules, surface type, hours, operator, website, and a description. A spot with a richness score of 3 or higher gets a full, indexable detail page. Below that, the page still exists (you can click through from a listing page and see whatever we have), but it's marked noindex for search engines, since a page with almost no information isn't a useful search result on its own. The listing pages, things like "Waterfalls in Georgia," carry the search weight instead, since they group everything we know into one comparable table.

"Last verified" dates

The date on each listing page reflects when that data was last pulled and processed, not when a person physically visited. Treat it as "this is what OpenStreetMap said as of this date," not a guarantee that a gate hasn't closed or a fee hasn't changed since.

Update cadence

We re-run the full data pipeline monthly. Between updates, if you find something wrong, a closed access point, a fee that's changed, a listing that shouldn't exist, the fastest fix is usually to correct it directly in OpenStreetMap, since we pull from there and so does everyone else using OSM data.

Current coverage

As of the last build, we're tracking 15,608 spots across the eleven states.

Contact

This is a staging build with a placeholder brand and no public contact address yet. Once the site has a real domain, contact details will go here.