The Trail Mapping Project
Welcome to the The Trail Mapping Project web site. This site has been put together to disseminate information on a project which I started with the purpose of mapping and documenting equestrian trails in Southern California. Within these page, I will present the maps which have been produced and the methods used to produce them.
Why The Trail Mapping Project?
For years now, equestrian trails have been under assault by developers, environmentalists, individuals and government agencies. Many times, the claims are that "We did not know that trails existed in an area," so the trails get destroyed by developers, get neglected by various agencies who would otherwise help maintain them or get closed by individuals worried about litigation. Therefore, the aim of this project is to document the fact that trails do exist and try to establish some sort of baseline to that fact that they may have been there for some time, thus making it possible to protect them through proscriptive rights easements included into management plans.
There are those who think that documenting trails is a bad thing because they have the off base notion that what is not know cannot be lost. Well quite frankly, this does not work. If the knowledge is restricted to only a few, then it is already lost. Also, much like things on the Internet, "Security through obscurity" is no real security at all.
The History of The Trail Mapping Project
In 1995, some of the first affordable consumer GPS units were making their debuts. I was living in Maryland at the time and immediately saw the potential for recording equestrian trails. The equestrian group in Maryland (TROT - Trail Riders Of Today) published a book of trail maps for a few areas. I was excited about that until I bought the book and discovered that the maps were crude hand drawn maps. (They did put a lot of work into the book, mapping the trails using compass and distance measuring wheel.) I had more of the thought that trails plotted on USGS topographic quad maps would be more useful.
Since the subject was so new, tools for doing what I wanted were virtually non-existent. I had to write special software to download the data from the GPS unit. Then other software to plot it on a map. But then the maps had to come from some place and calibrated before there was something to plot on. I was able to produce some crude maps. Another major obstacle to producing good maps was the fact that the Military was scrambling the GPS signals so that you could only know your position to within a 300 feet (100 meters). That was pretty discouraging. Nothing like going out, collecting data, only to have the trail mysteriously appear on the opposite side of the canyon you were riding through.
The State of Maryland Department of Natural Resources heard about the efforts and approached TROT about mapping equestrian trail throughout Maryland. They purchased 2 resource grade GPS units (the kind where the data can be reprocessed to remove the Military scrambling) trained several members in the use of the units and turned them lose to start mapping trails.