A summer with many miles of trails and riding has passed. I've learned a few more trails, and added some nice tools for communicating about them.
I got a Global Positioning System (GPS) device for my birthday at the end of June, and have had a chance to record "tracks" around many trails around here. One such effort is available at http://www.bikely.com/maps/bike-path/Minuteman-Connector-Loop-1.
I've been putting together a few detailed maps using the GPS track data, but I'm not content with the results yet. Below is one way of representing the trails of the Willard's Woods conservation land in Lexington:
After playing around with a variety of software tools to merge the GPS tracks with other existing maps, I've found several ways to produce something fairly usable. A very nice tool is GPS Trackmaker, free from www.gpstm.com (I think). It allows me to bring in an image file of a map and overlay that with the GPS tracks.
It turns out that there is a lot of manipulation needed on most map images before they can be used as a background for GPS tracks. For example, they have to be aligned with North to the top. I found that the free software Irfanview allows rotation of images by fractions of degrees, which is invaluable for this kind of alignment.
Another view of Willard's Woods trails using the Lexington Town map as a background may be easier to read, since it only shows the roads.
The tracks should be displayed as wider lines, I think. Also, I should erase the big number 6, which is the voting precinct within Lexington. The heavy dotted lines are also precinct lines...
So the summer has not been wasted as far as the trail mapping goes... Just in a learning mode as far as mapping tools, and an enjoying mode, as far as getting out and riding the trails instead of talking about them. I'm sure you can understand!
Now with the shorter days of autumn and winter, I'll have to work through all those stored GPS tracks and start churning out the maps.
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