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  A historical document of a farmer in "Dry Run Hollow" depicts that he moved from a property next to it and mentions this area.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.

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.

Governmental Overlays - Complete

Yesterday, I finished the map overlays for most governmental and non-governmental reservations on, or along the Buckeye Trail (BT).  Waypoints had to be added for those that didn't have any.  For most that did, their PDF format maps had to be converted to a JPG image.  Then some had to be cropped in Microsoft Paint in order to make them easier to overlay in Google Earth Pro.  But before I did that, I had them uploaded to the cloud so that their locations were on the internet and not specific to the structure of my computer's file system.

For any waypoints, instead of cropping banner images, I just looked up the park agencies on Facebook and used their image location as the waypoint icons.  With the help of the BTA GIS/ GPS Depository, prospective hikers can get a glimpse of what's around the trails.  They might want to go to a campsite, restaurant or lodging and may find that a park district's trail could get them there faster?  And on most maps, except ones from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources - Divison of Parks, they can trace the path in Google Earth and upload it to their GPS's.  But without being able to compare all the information in one place, it might be difficult to do with several different sources.

These overlays aren't the whole project.  They a part of something larger.  I'm going to re-write the BT's on-road tracks so that theres one between every intersection.  There's roughly 720 miles on on-road trail.  The other half is on-road, so I'm going to delete my section tracks down until I'm left with the off-road reservations.  Then delete them down into off-road intersections.

Piece of cake.  That off-road is the other half of the BT's 1,440 total mileage. that I don't really have to worry so much about.  As for the on-road, I'm planning on getting my pen tablet configured so I can just drop path anchors and terminators.

Governmental Reservation Overlays - 03/17/2017 - 01

I just overlaid 6 counties worth of metropark's maps today.  The Buckeye Trail in Northeast Ohio is done.  As for the Ohio & Erie Canal Towpath and the Zoar Valley Trails, I'm going to hold off until later.  With the OECTT, I'm just going to dump whatever I already have into it.  And the Zoar Valley is only going to be a track.

But as for today, my brain is done.

Governmental Reservation Overlays - 03/16/2017

I got reservation and park maps overlaid for the Buckeye Trail in the Lake Metroparks and Geauga Park District overlaid in Google Earth today.  I almost missed Orchard Hills Park along the Bedford Section.  That section clips has a 2 - 1/2 mile "clip" through northwest corner of Chester Township in Geauga County.  I was having a problem with Google Earth's image rotation locking after 90°.  But I found that if I went into the overlay properties-> location, that I could rotate adjust the rotation with a numerical degree value in a field.

I've always been very active in the Buckeye Trail's Facebook group.  And I'm having a hard time not telling them what I'm up to.  All I can say about it for now is that it's for the annual TrailFest in Yellow Springs of Greene County.  It's probably about time that I presented GPS material there.

Log 2016042201

With a scanner, I haven't perfected the use of the Optical Character Reader (OCR). If I did, I could back-up my paper map and guides to a JPEG (.jpg) format image file. At that point, the OCR would detect the words on the page and I'd be able to select, highlight, copy, then paste them into the properties of various parts of the properties of my GPS data. That way when I uploaded it to my hand GPS, or smartphone, I'd have the text there instead. But for now, my Garmin eTrex 20 hand GPS won't read more than a line or so of the properties text. However, my smartphone's mapping app will read everything. I just thought about it... since I haven't mastered the OCR, I could scan the image, then use Microsoft Paint to crop the text and save it to a new file. After the cropping is done, I could add them as an image overlay and position them in the right spots and my smartphone app should pick up on those. Personally, I would never distance hike without paper resources. So for me, it's just that when I'm mapping at home, sometimes I have to consult the paper map and guides and I'd rather not if I don't have to.

State park and forest maps often come in the Portable Document File (PDF) format. Well, the only thing that Google Earth will overlay is a JPEG (.jpg) image. When you want to overlay your PDF map, it needs to be converted. So far, I've been using the web converter at http://pdf2jpg.net. It's best that after you convert, that you open it into something like Microsoft Paint, crop that one document it into several smaller chunks. That will make it easier to reposition, rotate and re-size in Google Earth. Smaller images will allow you to focus on detail in a smaller area as you try to match the curves in the local roads. With some maps, that's futile. Seldom do I ever get them perfect. And maps from the Ohio Department of Natural Resource - Division of Parks are hopeless. But if they're in sync, or somewhat, you might be able to trace a track (by drawing a "path") that you could upload to a GPS enabled device in the event that the various downloading communities don't have a file for it. About ODNR - Parks, an overlay of their maps might be good for making placemarks/ waypoints for locations such as "disc golf" and "shower houses." That might be good for organizational prep if the park had to be scouted for opportunities in person.

Log 2016012301

This is an image of the Winter 2016 System Map from the Toledo Area Regional Transit Authority (TARTA) with a track that corresponds to their Route 29 - Waterville Call-a-Ride against the route of the Buckeye (BT) and North Country Trail's (NCT) overlaid. Because of their color, the BT and NCT are very difficult to see.  But NCT is in blue on the lower left, while the Defiance and Pemberville Section's of the BT are in light blue and it's a little left of center at the bottom.

If you look and find where the NCT meets the highway that travels east into Whitehouse of Lucas County, a walk to the Kroger grocery store (on the edge of the Waterville Call-a-Ride's zone) is 4.1mi and barely disqualified to be mentioned in the Ohio Transit Hiker's Resource (OTHR).  I downloaded TARTA's system map from their website, which comes in the PDF format.  I then used PDF to JPG online converter to convert it into a JPG image.  The reason is that Google Earth will only allow me to over lay images.

The conversion website allowed me to choose the outputs quality and since I have a powerful computer, I choose 300dpi (their maximum setting).  When I first overlaid the image on Google Earth, it had to be resized and repositioned.  To that, I lowered the opacity on each image so that they'd become more transparent.  And that allowed Google Map's main roads and highways to appear with TARTA's system map overlay that I used as a basis for the repositioning and resizing.

TARTA's system map is drawn to scale and that made things easier. But I wasn't able to get it to match perfectly.  That's OK, they seldom ever do anyway.  So what I'm going to do from here is it as a template to trace it's Call-a-Ride Zones using polygons, which are shapes of unlimited sides.  Once the polygon closes, Google Earth will assign a color and fill the shape with it.  I'll probably use whatever color TARTA has on their map just to make it match.

Last night, those two 300dpi images plus working on one polygon made my CPU overheat and crash my computer.