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2016/06/23

Log 2016062301

- Yesterday, I put out a request to family friends to service the motorhome.

Today, I started editing tracks for the Kekekabic, The Border, Superior and the independent North Country Trail's.  My GIS tracks were downloaded when I was planning my Alternate Sea-to-Sea Hike about 5 years ago.  And recently, I was reminded that there was a gap between the North Country Trail Association's Wisconsin tracks and those of the Superior Hiking Trail in Minnesota.

At the time, I wouldn't have known how to overlay a park map like I do today, but I made one and found the missing link.  There's a off-road trail in the Jay Cooke State Park, somewhere in excess of 6 miles long that is not routed by either agency.  I attempted to make a post with screen shots of my Google Earth application to the NCTA's Facebook group, but my computer crashed while I was tracing the route.

I was using an image on Superior's website of a Minnesota DNR map of the park.  The resolution wasn't great, so in drawing the track by hand, I had to just do the best I could.  With the opacity at about 25%, I was able to see what looked like a wide trail, or some kind of skid road that this was routed on.  But because the resolution on the image was too low, I was unable to determine what the trail's name was.

I reluctantly had to trace from the image because there weren't any downloads for this particular trail with Everytrail, which is a web site that end users submit their own GPS tracks for the public to use.  There's also TrailLink, but they don't have it either.

The good news is that Minnesota DNR maps are drawn to scale in the north direction.  But I'm not a fan of how lightly illustrated the roads and highways are.  I rely on these, the shapes of ponds, lakes and other things to properly lock the image's proportions to.  But they could be worse.  They're nothing like the Ohio Department of Natural Resources - Division of Parks who use more interpretative maps that don't match up well at all.

With Division of Parks maps, the only reason I even try is to trace a general route of a trail that I can find elsewhere except tracking it on my GPS in person, or if I need to put down waypoints/ placemarks on it's facilities, it can at least get me close, or close to finding them.

When it comes to merging track, Minnesota is a different challenge because the North Country Trail is concurrent with 3 hiking trail agencies.  And my goal is to merge the state's track into one so I can view it's total mileage, high and low points.  Well, Ohio is like this and I've already merged it's data.  The way that this is going to go is that each agency will reveal it's numbers.  Then North Country independently will have it's.  I'll report on all that and the overall length, high & low points for it's route in Minnesota.

Seeing as if I even get that far...  This is a side project because I have nothing better to do.  I don't subscribe cable TV, so I always keep myself busy with something. But, if I get my motorhome fixed, I might be down trail soon.  And resuming this North Country merge project is something that I'd reserve for the winter.  And even at that, since I don't plan on hiking there anytime soon, I'm afraid to say that it isn't a priority.

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