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.

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.

Hiking North America - A Loop

Not including the mileage for the Central New York Chapter and Adirondacks of North Country Trail - New York, the total for the rest of a loop that consists partly of the Finger Lakes, North Country, Long, Appalachian, American Discovery and Buckeye Trails is 1,961.04 miles long.  It would be routed through Ohio, Pennsylvania, New York, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia.  This is once the Middlebury Land Trust in Vermont completes the North Country to the Long Trail.

Dispersed Camping Prohibited - ADT in Monongahela NF

The American Discovery Trail in West Virginia is routed through the Potomac and Cheat Ranger Districts of the Monongahela National Forest.  As of the date of this log, dispersed camping is not permitted in these ranger districts

ADT Adventure Planning - Mapping Tip 05/06/2017

If you don't know a lot about GPS mapping, your not alone.  But I'm here to help you.  First, lets start

by downloading Google Earth Pro.  It's free these days.

You should start with the roads.  You can construct them using Google My Maps.  Unlike regular Google Maps, this will allow you to save your work to your Google Account and export it to a KML file to open in Google Earth.  It has limitations, such as the track can only be moved about 10 times.  And each map can only have about 10 layers, or segments in it.  There's simple work arounds to these.  If you run out of reroutes, just use a shorter segment.  And if you run out of layers, just create another map.

Some of the trails are named in the various turn-by-turn guides.  You'll need a membership to AllTrails.  This is where adventurists like yourself have recorded the trail on their own GPS's and uploaded the file for others to use.  Not all of the trails that are on the ADT are on there.  And the source may not be accurate.  The reason being is there's no telling what device recorded it, how often it anchored the track, or how good the weather was that day?

When the trail is concurrent with another distance trail, you can download their track data and open it in Google Earth for you to use.

If a named, or unnamed trail that the ADT is on that you can't find on AllTrails and occurs within a national forest, you might find it's path using a USGS Topo overlay in Google Earth.  It's route should be written on the map.  Using the "path" feature, you can trace a track over it.  The source should not be trusted as being accurate.  But down trail, sometimes you have to follow the trail and not the GPS.  When your there, just verify by sight that it's impossible for another trail to be on that course and the one your on is probably right.  Make sure that you continue to run in and out of it, or it's staying parallel.

Using the USDA Forest Service FSGeodata Clearinghouse's Data Extract Tool, 

you'll see that I selected that square icon with the circle and the blue in it.  At the bottom of #1, I choose a forest.  Then in #2, "I checked National Forest System Trails."  In #3, I selected the "Shapefile - SHP - .shp" file format option.  This resource might have some of the trails that you're looking for?

Also, "National Forest Service Roads" might work.  The ADT does take place on some of them.

Your GPS software might not read shapefiles.  You might have to convert to KML.  Since these are just tracks, I'd use something like my Geodata Converter.

If your using a smartphone, or do know, or trust your hand GPS's stock software, somewhere in your manual should be the location of the folder that it reads data from.  I do it this way myself.  But it requires a conversion to the GPX format.  You can convert KML to GPX with GPSVisualizer's "Convert a File" feature.  Select your output format as "GPX," then your file and click on "Convert."  When the next page opens up, right click on the link, left click "save," or "save linked content as" give it a name and save it to your hard drive.

Water Resupply - The Wilderness Loop 05/05/2016

I've been working with the mining and surface stream data for The Wilderness Loop of the Buckeye Trail (North Country concurrent partially), which consists of the Road Fork, Whipple and parts of the Belle Valley and Stockport Sections.  I've got data that might make the situation better than it has been.  What I've mean is that I've identified streams that are probably not contaminated with heavy metals.  And so far, my data can support 10 mile continuous hikes, except present day RF 04 - 10.  That's 13.82 miles where I can't get public access to the few surface streams that I believe are uncontaminated.  This area, which is northwest of Caldwell of Noble County is, or was heavily mined and the only two remedies that I can see now are if the section gets a private water or camp host, or an in-person trip down OH-78 reveals the presence of a convenience store that wouldn't show up on a Google map or search (sometimes this happens).

Bathing and Wading Spots - The Wilderness Loop

There are two places to bathe or wade in the Little Muskingum River on the Road Fork and Whipple Sections.  They're both on federal property in the Marietta Unit - Wayne National Forest.  The first is at the Ring Mill on the Road Fork.  The road in results in a cul-de-sac.  Just north of the cul-de-sac, there's a fisherman's access on the north side.  The river there usually maintains a depth of a couple feet or so.

The second site is in Whipple's Little Muskingum River Flats.  Down on that mile, the place that I know of is if one were hiking Buckeye/ North Country National Scenic Trail heading clockwise/ westbound, there's a usually dry steam bed that ejects into the river early in the flats from that direction.  One could use it to get down into the river.  But this one's not as good because the river tends to be very shallow here in the summer.

A good bath in the river should make you feel clean.  If your in there, while your at it, you can do a little laundry too.  The Little Muskingum might have hard metals in it.  There are former mines on it's fingers, streams and fork. so I do not recommend purifying or filtering it for oral consumption.  It has a south westernly flow that meets the Ohio River at the Census Designated Place of Reno (where the NFS field office is for the Marietta Unit).