yorkspace.com

So here comes the techie stuff… My friend also has a Garmin GPSMAP 60 that we used to record our entire journey around the loop. It has an external antenna connection that allowed us to keep the GPS in his pocket and attached the antenna to his pack. Much slicker than my “old” Garmin eTrex Venture.

We dumped the track out of his GPS into a gpx file. I took that and pulled it into EasyGPS. It’s a great free program for manipulating GPS files. I used it to clean up the track a little bit. There were some portions where we wandered off the trail or stopped or lunch, creating some extraneous data points.

The other cool thing I was able to do was pull it into another neat program by National Geographic, called TOPO! As the name suggests, it’s topographic mapping software. It’s not free, but for $100 you can get Michigan, Indiana and Ohio (They have other groups of states for the same price.) It can directly interface with a GPS and import GPX files. So, here’s my trip route imported into TOPO!

The other feature this TOPO! software does that’s worth mentioning is the 3D fly-through. It allows you to select your route and fly through it so you can get an idea of what the terrain is like. At first it seemed more like an eye candy feature, but now I can see how it would be useful to at least know what to expect. I don’t think I would necessarily change my route, but it could be helpful to decide which way to go first if you’re taking a loop.

I’m also making my GPX file available for download here. In the GPX file, you’ll find the route and a bunch of waypoints. Most of them belong to the route, but we also marked and specifically named some of them. Here are my descriptions for those points:

• MRL PKG - This is where we parked at the Red Bridge access.
• CAMP1 - This is where we stayed on Thursday night. Basically, this is just an open field. Water is not readily available.
• REDHILL - A cool little lookout. This would be another great place to camp.
• NCT CAMP2 - Another place we marked that looked to be a really good camping spot.
• CREEK BRDG - Stopped to have dinner here on Friday night. The bridge make a nice place to set up cooking equipment. There are also some man-placed wooden stumps to take a seat. The river is also great for filtering water and getting your feet wet after a day of hiking.
• SUSPBRIDGE - This is the bridge that crosses over the Manistee River.
• MRT1 - This is where we stayed Friday night. This was by far the best camping spot we came across.
• MRT CAMP2 - Another place we marked that looked to be a really good camping spot.
• SLAGLEGRDG - I think this was a swampy area with a bridge going over it.
• ARQ CREEK - The trail crosses over a small creek. This is a good place to stop and filter some water if you need it.

Here are a few other GPS related links to take a look at:
Motionbased
http://www.motionbased.com/

GPS Visualizier
http://www.gpsvisualizer.com
http://www.gpsvisualizer.com/map

Geocaching
http://www.geocaching.com/

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 4th, 2006 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Backpacking, Camping, GPS. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.