Campgrounds and Overlays for ADT - WV Complete and More

The overlays and campgrounds are done for the American Discovery Trail - West Virginia.  There's one questionable place that I'm unable to get a location for and that is Van Myra Campground in Mineral County.  I'm not sure that I understand what this reservation is, but it seems like it's a picnicking area only now?  A historical document of a farmer in "Dry Run Hollow" depicts that he moved from a property next to it and mentions this area.

I found Dry Run Road in Mineral County, but the structures on the properties didn't match the county's description.  If it is a picnicking area, it might still have a potable water well?  And that still might be of use, pending that the reservation is in range.

"Range" is a term that I use to determine the hiker's patience, or how far they're willing to go off trail to reach an amenity?

I posted on the ADT's Facebook group asking any previous multi-day+ hikers if they've ever had an overnight at an RV park in Kansas or Nebraska?  In Kansas, these types of establishments are the are fairly common, where conventional "campgrounds" are in short supply.

One thing that this project could use are the location of post offices, particularly in the desert areas.  Shipping resupply might be expensive, but those might as well be resupply points and from what I know of Ohio, they can still be in the smallest of towns (even unincorporated ones).  On the Appalachian Trail, a hiker can receive a bounce package, or mail drop on General Delivery/ first class shipping.  But that's because there are thousands, if not millions of them coming through every year.  Those towns have an economy built on them.

Under ordinary circumstances, if somebody doesn't live in that zip code, or have a PO Box, then they can't ship on General Delivery.  It has to be either "Priority Mail Hold for Pickup," or "Express Mail Hold for Pick-up."  On a trail with low numbers, even if somebody from a state committee showed up in every post office and got them to accept general delivery, there's probably not enough hikers annually for them to get use to it.  And I think General Delivery could cause a problem when a package was sent there first class and the post master didn't recognize who it was for that day and shipped it back.

However, there could be a solution to this.  Post Offices have community cork boards.  And if an ADT flier were to posted to one where general delivery was arranged, in some places it might not do much for trail promotion, but it might remind the postmaster even if the trail has low numbers?  And there might be something that we generally don't know about the AT's mail drops and that is what if, with all of their support, could somebody have been donating the annual fees for PO Boxes at all those post offices???  There's could be at least $1200 a year in those?

A couple days ago, I was looking for more BLM property polygons.  I have Utah and Nevada so far and I think California is about all I'm going to get out of it.  That's because I'm not seeing anything for surface parcels east of there.  Seems that everything else pertains to the federal government's subsurface mineral rights.

Camping - American Discovery Trail - Nevada

These are not all camping locations.  The maroon areas are the ranger districts for the Humboldt - Toiyabe National Forest in Nevada.  What many of those icons pertain to are stretches of BLM property along the trail.  That fuchsia outlined area is a polygon that's supposed to be colored solid.  Within those lines is BLM Land.  It stretches way south of this map and it's a one piece polygon.  It's been challenging my computer system all day long.  The problem with BLM is that it's interrupted by private properties.  So what I did with the green tent placemarks there was stated a code, "BLM NV Dis C I/O, or O/I.

With the "I/O's" and "O/I's," the first value is always in the westbound direction.  In electronics, it stands for closed circuit/ open circuit.  To most of us, that's "on" and "off."  This is the way it will appear in a GPS, so what I'm doing is signaling the beginning and end of dispersed camping areas.

But all this data is beta at the moment.  What I haven't done is overlay a topographic map to determine if the areas I stated were even suitable for camping.   I got the fixed campsites plotted for the American Discovery Trail in Utah, Nevada and California today.  In all this work, my Google Earth Pro application crashed 6 times in the process of all this.  Tomorrow, I might go into the operating system's task manager and give Google Earth a high priority on the CPU usage.

I thought about this days ago...  In Google Earth, you have what is known as the "My Places."  It's the left window pane that stores elements that you can activate quickly.  In working with ADT's mapping, it's taken on a lot of information since January.  And mine is slowing Google Earth's startup down.   What I think I'm going to have to do is clean up the My Places and work with by storing things on my hard drive more.  I'll need to bring somethings up only as I needed.  Hopefully, that will save on system resources in the process.

I just rebuilt my computer 4 months ago.  The motherboard is new, the CPU is a mid-grade I5 Intel, it has 16GB of RAM and I'm working with a four hard disk setup on a manual RAID.  I'm not sure what the display card is, but I know it's good enough to support 3 monitors instead of two.  I'm not sure if going to a 4.0GHz I7 processor would be enough?

It was tough finding the right BLM shapes.  I've never had to do business with them before.  I almost gave up.  But I finally prevailed when I picked up surface parcel data on the "BLM NV Surface Management Agency (SMA)" from the BLM Navigator.  It's just like the property parcels that I worked with along the trail in Utah.  You're going to get the entire state.  And when you do, you need to go along the trail's track and deactivate the BLM property shapes.  When you get to the end of the trail, in the left window pane, start deleting what you don't need.

Now there's hundreds, if not thousands of them.  And while Shift + Deleting, things are going to go fast.  Your parcels could be anywhere, so make sure that you don't get too "delete happy" or you'll delete right over it.  You don't want to let it get you too mesmerized and that's easy to do with all those layers.