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2017/05/16

Seven Years of Mapping - The Learning Curve

In 2010, this predated the BTA GIS/ GPS Depository. So, there were no GPS tracks for the Buckeye Trail and this was before the popularity of end user submitted track websites like AllTrails or TrailLink. In the beginning, I think I somehow figured out a way to track it's roads only. When I was preparing for my transcontinental hike in 2011, it didn't have maps for everywhere. Besides, I wanted to get a track and waypoints on my GPS. It took a lot of work. I didn't know how to merge trail back then. It was only after my hike failed and I got back to working with the Buckeye Trail's stuff, I figured out it's precise methodology by months of experimenting. GPX, KML/ KMZ are all based on the XML language. XML is a website language that is related to basic HTML. I know some HTML. You can plot it out on a flow chart. Only that with other programming, they have if/then/else statements, or contingencies and loops. HTML is more like a straight line of sequences that has one beginning and one end. I've never written a sub-routine into HTML before. That would seem to suggest that each track has a specific beginning and an end as written in the language. And that it does. My Garmin eTrex 20 hand GPS does not take well to raw GIS tracks. There's thousands of them on any given distance trail and my "track manager" can only show about 250. The track lengths start at about 29ft long. The track manager orders tracks by distance, but it's too confusing to use like that.

Anyways, there's not telling what order the tracks were recorded in? That's unless you break them down into sections and then number them all. In Google Earth, there's a track listing in the left window pane. But you can't use that, it's what's mixing up the order. So the procedure that I came up with was to start by clicking on a terminating track and labeling it by section. When done, I'd go back over it and number the tracks starting with "00." One thing learned along the way if that if your going to number something on GPS's or in Google Earth, all single digit numbers must have a preceding zero. And all computer's that I know of start numbering at zero. I've done some kind of GPS mapping on the following distance trails: Buckeye North Country American Discovery International Appalachian Trail - Newfoundland & Labrador, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Maine Trans Canada Appalachian Long Finger Lakes That probably qualifies as an extensive background.

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