Difficulties: the colour of your trails

A trail isn't just a track: it's a rated track. The difficulty is what lets a user decide whether to commit to it, and what lets your crew know what they mean when they say "the black one".

In Sentinel that rating isn't a mere label. A difficulty level carries two things:

• a symbol — the circle, square and diamond of the North American trail-rating convention;
• a colour — the one that paints the trail's track on every map in the app.

Setting your difficulties therefore sets how your whole network looks, everywhere at once.

Where: left navigation bar, under Administration → Trail Difficulties.

The seven levels you get out of the box

When your place is created, Sentinel installs seven levels. You have nothing to do to get started: they're already there, already rated, already coloured.

That's the convention nearly every mountain-bike and ski network in North America uses. If yours already follows it, you probably have nothing to change.

Two structural points worth knowing right away:

Difficulties belong to the place, not to the activity. Unlike task types, which are attached to an activity, the difficulty list is single and shared by all of your networks. The black diamond on your bike network is the same object as the one on your ski network.

The order of the list is a real setting. It isn't cosmetic: it's what sorts your trails. A trail list is displayed from the top of the difficulty list down, then by name.

The list

The section lives under Trails → Difficulties in the sidebar.

Drag a row to change the order; it saves immediately, there's no button to confirm. Sort from easiest to hardest: that's the order your trails will then appear in across every list.

The search box at the top filters by name, which only becomes useful past a dozen or so levels — rare, but possible.

Editing a level

Clicking a row opens its page.

Three fields, with three very different reaches:

The name is purely a display. Renaming it is safe: trails don't point at the name, they point at a stable internal identifier. You can go from "More difficult" to "Intermediate" without a single trail moving.

The colour is the most visible of the three. It applies everywhere, immediately: the trail's line on the map, the badge in the lists, the group headers in the task table, the dashboard charts. Change the blue on "More difficult" and your entire intermediate network changes colour at once.

The symbol is picked from a grid of five shapes: circle, square, diamond, double diamond, triangle.

One useful note here: the grid only exposes five shapes, while the seven built-in levels use seven. The white circle on "Easiest" and the double orange diamond on "Proline" each have their own artwork, but neither of those two is offered in the grid. If you edit one of those two levels and change its symbol, you won't be able to get back from the interface. In practice: leave the symbol of those two alone if you care about their original look.

Nothing applies until you hit Save, and the app holds you back if you leave the page with unsaved changes.

Adding a level

The Add a difficulty button creates a blank level: a name, a colour, a symbol. It lands at the end of the list — remember to drag it to its real place in the scale.

Create one when your network has a category the North American convention doesn't cover: a "Shared trail", a "Family beginner loop", a "Seasonal closure". These are real cases, and a dedicated level beats a hacked-up trail name.

What deleting one breaks

This is the takeaway of this page.

Deleting a level does not reassign the trails that used it. Sentinel deletes the level and stops there. The trails that carried it keep pointing at an identifier that no longer exists, and it shows:

• on the web, the trail falls back to the "Easy" symbol drawn in black, and its difficulty name is displayed in its raw technical form;
• on mobile, it goes grey, with an information icon in place of the symbol;
• in every list sorted by difficulty, it drops to the bottom, whatever its real level.

Nothing is lost and nothing is broken in the strict sense — the trail still exists, it's simply orphaned from its rating. But the map becomes misleading, which is exactly what you're trying to avoid.

So the procedure is the reverse of the natural order: first reassign every affected trail to another level, from each trail's page, and delete the level afterwards. If you aren't sure a level is unused, rename it rather than delete it — that costs nothing and breaks nothing.

Where difficulties show up

Once your levels are set, they come back everywhere:

That's what makes a colour change so visible: there's no single place to update, everything follows automatically.

On mobile

The section exists in the mobile app too, and it's complete — you can create, edit, delete and reorder there.

The path: Account → your place → Trail Difficulties.

Three gestures specific to mobile:

• A long press on a row grabs it so you can drag to reorder.
• A swipe sideways on a row reveals delete, one level at a time.
• Edit, top right, switches to multi-select: checkboxes appear and you can delete several levels at once.

Those deletions have exactly the same consequences as on the web — the same caution applies.

Who can change the list

Difficulties fall under the Trails right in the place settings.

• With read access you see the section and the levels without being able to change them: the add and edit controls disappear.
• With read and write you can create, edit, reorder and delete.

It's the same right that governs trails and activities — which is consistent: all three describe the network itself. If you can see the list but nothing is editable, that's the right to ask for, in your role.

Three pieces of advice

Set them before importing your trails. The import assigns a difficulty to every track; you may as well have it land on the right scale the first time.

Keep the scale short. Seven levels already cover almost every network. A fifteen-level scale is unmanageable in the field and unreadable on a map.

Rename rather than delete. It's the only operation in this section that is both useful and completely risk-free.