How reviews work on Lemoyn

How we calculate the weather

On many spots you will see a condition nobody reported – it is labelled “calculated”. What we show there is not a weather forecast, but what the weather of the past weeks has done to the ground. That is a different question: any weather app can tell you whether it is raining today. Whether the trail is muddy because of it depends on how wet it already was.

The ground as a bucket

For every spot we track a water store. Precipitation fills it; sun, warmth and wind empty it again. That level is the memory of the calculation, and it carries the decisive difference: rain every third day keeps the store permanently high because it never fully dries out. An hour of rain after two dry weeks hits an empty store and is gone overnight. Identical weather today, opposite trail – without us needing a special rule for it.

Why every spot dries differently

How fast the store empties differs from place to place. Loamy forest soil on a north-facing slope holds water for days; sandy ground on the south side is rideable again after an afternoon. The calculation therefore takes in soil type, elevation and slope aspect – the same amount of rain leads to two different results at two spots. Where we know the soil type per trail, we calculate per trail; otherwise for the whole spot.

What comes out at the end

The level becomes one of five words: dusty, dry, tacky, wet, muddy. That row is deliberately not a grading scale – the best state sits in the middle. “Tacky” is ground that is lightly bound by moisture and offers the best grip; bone-dry is rideable but looser than many expect. Frost and snow are calculated separately and take precedence in winter. An official closure by the operator beats everything: where it says closed, it is closed, whatever the ground is doing.

What your reports do to it

A report from the community always beats the calculation – whoever is standing there knows better than any model. It works twice over: immediately, by setting today’s value, and in the long run, by teaching the spot how fast it really dries. If you consistently report a spot as drier than we calculate, the calculation there follows. That is why every calculated value carries an invitation to confirm it – and why we distinguish strictly between “calculated” and “reported” in the labelling.

Where the calculation reaches its limit

A thunderstorm sometimes hits the neighbouring valley instead of this trail. We know rainfall on a grid, not at your corner. That is why wet values read “likely wet” and “likely muddy” while dry ones do not: “no precipitation for two weeks” is a safe statement, “heavy rain the day before yesterday” is not. And the longer a spot goes unconfirmed, the paler we display it – until it reads simply “unconfirmed”. A calculated value is a good guess, not an observation, and should never look like one.