Mapping Illinois DNR

It probably took me about 90 minutes to run through the full listing of state parks, forests, natural areas, conservation areas, fish hatcheries and so on for Illinois.  Since I'm unfamiliar with the state, each entry one had to be tried and it's location pin pointed in Google Earth and found to be roughly within 4 miles of the trail before I saved them.  The result was 20 reservations being on, or near the American Discovery Trail - Illinois on both mid-west routes.  Many of those will need maps overlaid.  Illinois Department of Natural Resources did not make this easy for me.  Some of the entries had incorrect names.

I think I'm going to hold off on the overlaying of maps and make sure that Indiana DNR reservations get plotted next. Then I'll overlay.  Once done, the overlays for the mid-west routes will be done except for Colorado.  I plan on doing the Western Region in it's own phase.

I'm out to map more camping areas afterward.  With the overlay opacities set from 50% to 80%, a placemark/ waypoint could be dropped on the road intersection with the last GIS'ed road.  That way, if they're getting directions on some kind of GPS, it will take them right to the un-GIS'ed road.

In the future, it could take them to water and parking.  And all of this could be done by someone else.  One of the first thing one learns when they try Google Earth for the first time is how to drop a placemark.  This task is far simpler than the convoluted mapping that I do.

Issues with Overlaying Maps - American Discovery Trail - Illinois (NMR)

I'm trying to overlay maps for the American Discovery Trail - Illinois on the North Midwest Route from remote.  But the Forest Preserve District of Will County isn't making this easy.  They have a great website, but no downloadable maps that I can find.  I need those because PDF usually have a better quality than a screen shot.  Either way, they both have to be cropped and saved as a JPG, then uploaded to the cloud and overlaid in Google Earth.

This project has to move on.  And so it will.

The best thing that I can come up with was putting down placemarks on the parks that Google Earth outlined along the trail.  But that's not going to show me the location of a porta johns or water fountains so somebody can pin placemarks on those in the future.

Log 2017011601

I have the GPS tracks for the American Discovery Trail (ADT) - Illinois on the North Mid-West Route (NMR).

For a running list, I currently have ADT tracks for:

Delaware
Maryland (incld. DC)
West Virginia
Ohio
Ohio NMR & SMR
Indiana NMR & SMR
Illinois NMR & SMR
Missouri SMR
Kansas SMR
Colorado NMR & SMR (but not west of Denver yet)


- The largest city on the ADT is San Francisco, California at (population).