I've been working on the trail promotion plan for the Buckeye Trail in Southeast Ohio and American Discovery in Parkersburg, West Virginia area. One of the things I need for a complete written plan is a list of television, radio stations, post offices, libraries, newspapers, colleges, universities and the location of county fairs. I already have some of that data collected, but it was written for the trail corridors and not entirely for this 15 county area. So, I'm busy populating the rest of it with remaining waypoints for corresponding items.
Finding post offices can be difficult sometimes in very rural areas. So, along with USPS - Find Locations feature, I'm using http://www.lat-long.com to look some of them up and get global coordinates. Sometimes a post office doesn't return a result in Google Earth, or the location could be bad? That service can search for post offices by county and I like this because USPS does their's in a radius and there's a chance that I might miss one.
What I need in this plan is a total number. I'm not sure if I'm going to do this yet, but I might select some of them as being priority locations. Months ago, I took a drive by tour of some of the ones nearest to the Road Fork Section - Buckeye/ North Country National Scenic Trail and the American Discovery Trail - West Virginia (ADT - WV). I separated it into 4 routes. And because of West Virginia's terrain, it would consume a lot of fuel and take about a week to post fliers, take them down, or rotate them. I'm adding many more post offices now. But these are probably community cork boards and this might not qualify outside of the corridors I mentioned?
The corridors are based on the abilities of a thru hiker and what they're willing to tolerate in terms of how far off trail they'd be willing to come to reach an amenity? I estimate that most of Southern Ohio to be a 15 mile per day area. And I project that the limit of the hiker patience with coming off trail to be 3.0 miles. Considering both sides, that makes for a 6 mile corridor. Now the ADT - WV, my plan is to cover the western most 41 miles. Those are on flat bicycle right of ways or streets, therefore; I estimate this to be a 20 mile per day area with an 8 mile corridor.
In the kind of logistics that I do, I work within these corridors to determine if a trail has the proper stated amenities to support a thru hike. The trails were probably built with this in mind at their inceptions, but it might not have been tracked from then on? In the meantime, amenities go out of business, or private support that was once there now might not be.
After all of the logistical waypoint preparation, amenity gap areas are detected when I write a document detailing the mileage, camping, lodging and resupply for every day across a distance trail. If I wanted to do it furthermore, I could do this on a spread sheet and keep track of the peak season lodging costs to tally them and come up with that distance trail's cost per mile.
When the amenity gap area is identified, there's several things that could be done with it.
1) Public Transit (even some rural counties have an agency)
2) The distance trail agency gains a new private camp host within the corridor. Trail Promotion might assist with this because they already engage the community.
3) The distance trail agency can re-route to, or near an amenity as long as Points (or days) A, B and C ("B" is the location of the new amenity) are within thru hike specifications. It's likely to increase the mileage of said distance trail. For some, that could translate into manpower, but gets the "I's" dotted and the "T's" crossed. This is probably most advantageous for on-road trail.
No comments:
Post a Comment