I finished up the tracks for the Clarion Chapter of the North Country Trail Association and the concurrent portion of the Rachel Carson Trails Conservancy's Baker Trail. One of the tracks marked as belonging to the conservancy occurred in an area where Clarion Chapter's NCTA tracks surrounded it. I'm patched for Pennsylvania, so I just merged it into Clarion.
When things don't go right during the merging process, I have a methodical diagnostic procedure. I don't always have to use it, but today I did on Clarion. 1/3rd of the chapter merged, but wasn't displaying the "measurements" tab when it was opened in Google Earth. Well, it had a lot of eastbound tracks that needed to be reversed. Apparently the final track, number 26, was westbound (in the correct direction to begin with) When everything else reversed the right way, number 26 was flipped heading eastbound.
I had to go back and verify the direction of every track to discover that 26 was wrong and then correct it. Clarion was easier because some of it's off-road route was on Google Maps and I was able to make single tracks for them. But, I started and finished Butler's. I started off with 64 tracks for that chapter, all of which are the NCTA originals. I had to get the track listing down by overtaking several short segments.
I'm not a GIS operator, but I think that the tracks facing the ways that they do is because that's the direction that they were recorded in. Even on the longest distance trails, most of these had to be made with the GIS on foot, making various measurements with the device along the way. I think that they're in different directions because it was just more advantageous to do those tracks that way at the time. It may have had to do with parking or camping?
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