Foliage-walker: a trail planner that got me off the screen(and told me the truth about Bengaluru) published: true

A developer built foliage-walker, an open-source trail planner that takes a place name, finds the nearby named trail with the most tree cover, picks the best-weather day of the week, calculates a departure time to finish before sunset, and exports a GPX route for offline maps. The tool uses a local open-weight LLM (qwen2.5:1.5b via Ollama) to write a short invitation, requires no API keys or accounts, and runs on the Python 3 standard library. In Bengaluru, where there is no autumn colour, it falls back to overall green cover and explains why instead of ranking by deciduous cover.

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 1: Touch Grass https://dev.to/challenges/hacktoberfest-week1-2026-10-05 foliage-walker takes a place name and finds the nearby named trail with the most tree cover. It picks the best-weather day this week, works out when to leave so you finish before sunset, and writes a short invitation. It also exports a GPX file, so you can load the route into an offline map and put your phone away. It's for walkers and runners who want to spend less time planning on a screen. I live in Bengaluru, where there's no autumn colour, so the tool had to learn to say so. In places with autumn forest it ranks trails by broadleaf deciduous cover. Where it doesn't, it falls back to overall green cover and tells you why. Give it a place. It finds the nearby named trail with the most tree cover, picks the best-weather day this week, works out when to leave before sunset, and has a local open-weight LLM write a short invitation. It exports a GPX file so you can load the route into an offline map and put your phone away. Built for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge, Week 1: Touch Grass. qwen2.5:1.5b : writes the invitation. No API keys or accounts. ollama pull qwen2.5:1.5b python foliage walker.py "Agara Lake, Bengaluru" --radius 4 --min-km 1.5 --model qwen2.5:1.5b Python 3 standard library only. Outputs plan.md and route.gpx open in Organic Maps or OsmAnd . The author developed and tested it on a… --model changes the model with one flag, so anyone with a bigger machine can use a bigger model.