Second mapping trip to the Boxford State Forest. The official map is on par with the 2007 revision of the Harold Parker map - bad, but not completely unusable. One baffling omission is that it shows the parking area at the end of Shapners Pond Road, but not the trail from the parking into the forest.

At 1000 acres, this is going to take several trips. After two trips and more than nine miles of walking, I’ve covered most of the North Andover trails, but that’s about a quarter of the forest.

This morning’s ramble was Pole Hill. Although it’s only 34 acres, it took an hour and a half, and 3.4 miles, to log all the trails. There are a lot of side trails that aren’t on the official map; they’re all blazed (white or orange), but many of them are subtle and hard to follow, especially the ones to the top of the hill. There are picnic tables and a canoe landing at the river. All in all, pleasant and very accessible.

This morning’s ramble was the Robert Pustell Reservation. At 2:40 and 6 miles, it was a bit longer than I planned to be out; it’s not that dog and I aren’t up to it, but I have other things I should be doing.

The map is very nicely drawn, with lots of detail about paths, stone walls, and wetlands. The problem is, it’s largely a work of fiction. There are a couple major trails that I just couldn’t locate, there are a number of trails that aren’t on the map, and the trails that are there often don’t bear much resemblance to the map.

To be fair, it looks like the bikers have created a number of new trails. There are prominent yellow diamond arrows throughout, and some of the new trails go over fairly big drops. More problematically, there are banked turns and constructed jumps in a couple places. OTOH, someone else has laced the banked turns with brush and rocks, so it looks like there’s some passive-aggressive push-back.

This morning’s ramble was the Cochran Wildlife Sanctuary at Phillips Academy. I didn’t even know it existed before now. 65 acres, wide smooth walking trails, rhododendrons in full bloom. It says “dogs must be leashed”, but all the dogs we met were off leash. Four miles only got the main trails; will return to get the secondary trails.

For tracklogging, I’ve recently starting using two devices simultaneously: my trusty Garmin eTrex Vista HCx, and my phone (HTC Dream a.k.a. T-Mobile G1, the very first Android phone). Originally, I was just trying to see how accurate the phone’s GPS was (pretty good, actually). Then I realized that if I got two recordings of the same track, and they agreed, I could trust them more. OTOH, if the two tracklogs don’t agree in a significant way, they’re probably both wrong. (This happened to me last week. I don’t know if it was because of heavy cloud cover, or bad alignment of satellites, or what, but I do know I have to go back and try again.)

This obviously works best when I’m walking, with both devices side-by-side in the palm of my hand. Not so good when I’m riding the horse, where I have the Garmin clipped to my belt, and phone in my pocket.