Avenza Maps Difficulties in Far SE Ohio

The Buckeye Trail Association's digital navigational aides by Avenza Maps are dependent on the paper ones.  The nearest in-person map retailer is the Wayne National Forest's Headquarters in Nelsonville, Ohio.  It's on US-33 between Athens and Logan, Ohio.

That is about 54 miles northwest of Marietta, Ohio.  That city is on the south side of The Wilderness Loop and has a much more favorable highway system to get there.  I don't even know if they're selling Whipple and Road Fork Sections there?  But once you arrive at their headquarters, the hiker is closer to the New Straitsville Section in the Athens unit and they might as well drive there?

We don't have an in-person map retailer in Far SE Ohio.  Selling this is more like convince stores that sell gasoline.  You don't make much of a profit selling the gas, it just brings people in the store.  But the BT Avenza Maps are new and I don't know what the effect of them are on the paper map sales?  I need to know.  Unfortunately, the paper map sales, like the rest of the BTA store were outsourced, so I can imagine that the two probably aren't talking to each other?

There's another problem... Adventurer's Project needs to increase the number of local hikers.  And that is going to take some time?  There is this concept of setting up it's dominoes to fall in the right order to attain a goal like this for instance.

In the meantime, we have 70 (I think) campground and lodging establishments in our 14 county coverage area.  If we get the attention of those, we're pretty deep and many of their customers are not going to drive to Nelsonville.  We've needed something that could have been easily obtained and it was supposed to be the Avenza Maps.

There's problem with Avenza.  The BTA's good intentions were probably that the trail could be measured using one of it's tools.  I could say from experience that this might work on most places.  But determining distances on the off-road natural surface paths in the Marietta Unit of The Wayne is very fine work that way.

What I did was used the US Forest Service FSGeodata Clearinghouse to write digital mile markers for the off-road trail only.  They are based on their track for this trail in this unit.  It's linked and ready for download on Adventurer's Project's website in the county pages listed under the "Hiker Resources" page.