| The Long Path - South-Central
Catskills
The Trail Conference's map committee chair, Herb Chong,
received a Notable Entry award in the recent Avenza MAPublisher
Competition for a new map of the Long Path in the Catskills.
This map is an experiment in possible new map designs for future
Trail Conference maps. Some of the features present on the map
are hill shading (already used on the Sterling Forest Map) and
trails that are the color of the blaze with indications of
whether they are on paved roads, woods roads, or narrow tracks.
Created from New York State 10m DEM and USGS 1:100K data, the
shaded relief, contour lines, GPS trail tracks, and USGS DLG
data were assembled in Illustrator 9 using MAPublisher 4.0.
Feature names were added from detailed local atlases and from
existing Trail Conference maps.
An Award Winning Map
Herb Chong
Many of you may know that the Trail Conference
has been producing its own hiking maps for approximately thirty
years. What you may not know is that the Trail Conferences’
maps have been good enough to win awards. In 1996, the
Shawangunk Trail map set won second prize in the competition
sponsored by the American Cartographic Association. This year, a
prototype map, "The Long Path – South Central
Catskills", produced as a design study for future hiking
maps to be created by the Trail Conference, won a Notable Entry
award from Avenza Systems Inc. in their First Annual Map
Competition.
Figure 1 – Reduced version of the map. (See
map in different sizes at the left)
Avenza Systems produces a program called
MAPublisher and the Trail Conference has been using it to help
create the newest, all-computerized maps. The Sterling Forest
Trails map is the first one published by the Trail Conference
that was created with the aid of MAPublisher. John Jurasek,
field data coordinator for map publications, is working on the
newest, computerized edition of the Hudson Palisade Trails map
set for publication some time in 2003. The upcoming 5th edition
of The Long Path Guide will have its maps created with
MAPublisher too.
Using computerized tools such as MAPublisher to
create hiking trail maps has opened up opportunities for
creating maps with more information than practical using
traditional map-making techniques. One technique that has become
standard for many types of maps such as the Trail Conference’s
hiking trail maps is the use of shaded relief. Shaded relief is
the use of an artificial lighting from the upper left corner of
the map towards the center to illuminate the bumpy surface of
the terrain. The shadows and highlights make it easier for the
non-expert map-reader to visualize the shape of the land.
Although it does not convey any more information than
traditional contour lines, it is easier to see the landforms.
Another technique for trail map creation that
becomes much easier with computer techniques is being able to
have more types of lines on the map for representing the trails.
The map that won the Notable Entry award from Avenza experiments
with some of these techniques to show hiking trails with more
information than easily possible before. The Long Path map uses
two techniques that haven’t been tried on Trail Conference
maps, color-coding the trail lines using their blaze colors, and
using an outline that depends on the nature of the trail’s
track. Footpaths, woods roads, and drivable roads each have a
different outline treatment to help in identifying the character
of the trail. Figure 2 shows the legend from the prototype map.
See Figure 3, 4, and 5 for enlargements of different sections of
the map.
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Figure 2 – Legend |
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Figure 3 – Slide Mountain |
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Figure 4 – Plateau and Sugarloaf
Mountains, The Devil’s Path |
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Figure 5 – Overlook Mountain |
Although the Trail Conference is still
experimenting with new styles in our computerized hiking maps,
the changes being made are being recognized by the computer
cartography community as new and aesthetically pleasing ways of
enhancing the information content of our maps. These changes
will begin to appear in the next generation of hiking trail maps
being created today.
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