In early August, spent three days backpacking in the Dolly Sods, a beautiful and unusual wilderness area in West Virginia. Highly recommended, especially if you want fresh blueberries in your oatmeal.
For maps, I downloaded OSM data to my Garmin. It was only partially complete. Searching, I found maps at http://www.jtphillips.com/DollySodsMaps/, good comprehensive mapping of Dolly Sods. Way back in 2004, they created maps using only GPS and open source software (sounds familiar :). I downloaded and image and printed it out for use on the trail.
After I got back I wanted to update OSM with a few of my tracks. I contacted a few of the previous mappers in Dolly Sods, as well as reaching out to the Dolly Sods Mapping site. Fantastically, John supported us using their data in OSM. To start, I converted the DollySods KML map to raw OSM data, using gpsbabel, and brought it into JOSM as a background layer, to compare to existing OSM data.
Fantastically, John was able to upload the GPS data to OSM, and then (joined in mapping!)[http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/johntrudy/edits]
At this point
- all of the trails in Dolly Sods have been better aligned to the GPS traces and to the Bing satellite
- trails were connected properly into a network
- tagging is consistent
- some data that was imported with TIGER was fixed up (removed tiger:reviewed)
- tagged the boundary of DollySods with additional tags ala http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:boundary=protected_area
- added Red Creek
- adding parking areas
There’s always more mapping to do, maybe later…
- a more comprehensive survey of campgrounds
- add more water features
- add trail numbers
This was great fun. Looking at the imagery after our trip was a great way to see it again. Hope I get to do more backpacking and mapping soon.
-Mikel
Discussion
Comment from robert on 21 August 2012 at 00:20
Best named geographical area ever.