Time to explore the trails
Enjoy ruby flushed sunsets sweeping through hemlocks and fresh rhododendron blooms as you hike through murals of eroded sandstone. Our maps take you there.
If you’re planning on hiking in the Daniel Boone NF, Great Smoky Mountains NP, Cumberland Gap NHP, or in Kentucky state parks, we might have a map and digital geodata for you. Check out our shop for maps and data you can purchase online.
We aggregate data from the National Weather Service, National Park Service, and Dry Sky to serve weather stations to help hikers understand weather and road conditions for the Daniel Boone National Forest and Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Time for a trip? Looking for a weekend in the woods, alone and untroubled by maintaining your boring social media accounts? Need to get lost for awhile? We understand that instinct and have maps to help. Consider wandering into a landscape of sandstone cliffs, river fords, and bear in the Big South Fork and North Daniel Boone Country.
Time to check the weather before packing your gear. Each of our stations (GRSM, CUGA, and DBNF) offer current weather observations, forecasts, webcams, archives, and climate information that updates every 15 minutes. Smell the mountain air, through the internet.
We have more weather mapping projects that we’re tinkering with. Check our GitHub repositiory that shows the radar for the Daniel Boone country and imagery from the GOES-16 satellite.
“Thus situated, many hundred miles from our families in the howling wilderness, I believe few would have equally enjoyed the happiness we experienced. I often observed to my brother, You see now how little nature requires to be satisfied. Felicity, the companion of content, is rather found in our own breasts than in the enjoyment of external things; And I firmly believe it requires but a little philosophy to make a man happy in whatsoever state he is. This consists in a full resignation to the will of Providence; and a resigned soul finds pleasure in a path strewed with briars and thorns.”
An account from Daniel Boone, 1784 from “The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone” (1784), by John Filson and Daniel Boone.
Visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park with our GPS pack and GeoPDF
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Building on our elevation profile maker, we examined height and elevation measures generated in the browser from Phase 2 elevation data within Lexington’s New Circle Road area.
Given the absence of a statewide digital surface model (DSM) for Phase 2, we created a self-hosted raster tileset. This approach encodes elevations as RGB JPEGs or PNGs, which can be natively read by browsers.
The DSM was calculated from the Phase 2 point cloud using the highest first-return in a 2-foot resolution raster. The DSM was converted to an RGB terrain. The following formula converts the three-band values to elevations:
e = (r * 256) + g + (b / 256)
Pretty simple! This encoding works for Lexington’s range of surface elevations, has a sub-inch precision, and can be interpreted by MapLibre as a ground surface on which to drape features. A shaded relief map of the DSM with tree canopy cover height is the default base map. In terrain mode, the map becomes a 3D surface showing relative heights of features.
Height is calculated by subtracting the digital elevation model (DEM) elevation from the DSM surface elevation. The DEM is a 2-foot resolution raster that models bare-earth ground elevation and is hosted on kyraster.ky.gov.
Explore the web page here: https://boydx.github.io/urban-observation-towers
Click the map to sample heights and elevations. Export the samples as a GeoJSON for use in another application.
Enlarge screenshot from the web page
Data derived from LiDAR collected in 2019 and provided KyFromAbove and the Kentucky Division of Geographic Information (DGI). Building footprints © OpenStreetMap Contributors. Analysis by UKy Department of Geography and Boyd Shearer.
Using the latest KyFromAbove 3-inch resolution aerial photography from 2024, we can get comfortably lost on our backcountry adventures. The latest imagery from our state’s aerial mapping program is impressive and in line with previous releases: it’s comprehensive, authoritative, highly detailed, and open data. We have updated two projects with the latest base maps from KyFromAbove.
Kentucky has multiple statewide elevation layers derived from lidar point clouds. KyFromAbove Phase 1 lidar has both a 5-foot resolution ground (bare-earth) and above-ground (trees and buildings) elevation models hosted as open raster data.
We can query these layers to find ground and surface feature elevations at specific locations, such as along a line. These elevation profiles are useful in urban planning, environmental studies, and infrastructure development.
Create elevation profiles and save the data as JSON.
Below are a screenshots from the web page.
Creating multiple profiles at Laurel Lake
Downloading them as JSON for use in other applications
KyFromAbove has long produced elevation datasets for the public. Using their Phase II lidar point clouds, we created a new shaded relief and DEM raster tile sets for web mapping. While most mapping applications focus on ground elevations, we use the above-ground elevations to make a digital surface model (DSM). These elevations show buildings, trees, and even cars.
These above-ground elevations, however, have unique challenges. The latest project attempts to minimize errors and create visually impactful shaded relief and RGB terrain layers from DEMs for elevations.
Check out the preview here: outrageGIS.com/maps/new-circle
Lexington’s UKy campus
outrageGIS.com started in 1999 and has been continuously online since then. The first version of the website had this animated GIF. Check out the evolution of the site on the Wayback Machine.
While we are known for trail maps, we started mapping for video animation and broadcast graphics. You might remember your nightly local news in Kentucky and seeing maps—we might have contributed to that graphic.
In the early 2000s, we slung on a Trimble Pro XRS backpack GPS unit, outfitted a one-color offset press studio, and began printing spot and process color maps. Our first title was the Red River Gorge trail, a two-color map that we sold in local gas stations. We then printed titles for the Big South Fork, Great Smokies, Cumberland Gap, and the Daniel Boone National Forest. We did numerous contract maps for state parks and non-profits, and even an audio driving tour, The First Frontier Audio Driving Tour.
In 2008, Boyd started teaching at the UKy Department of Geography and accepted a faculty position in 2018. His work focuses on terrain modeling and topographic mapping using lidar data. Periodically, outrageGIS mapping is brought into the classroom to demonstrate web and digital media technologies.
Over the years teaching GIS & mapping, Boyd has tried to connect his students with real-world mapping opportunities. One such opportunity emerged when Rowan County, Kentucky, wanted an interactive map showing trails and tourism destinations in the area. Workshopping with students in GEO 305 (Elements of Cartography) and later MAP 672 (Programming for Web Mapping) in UKy’s Department of Geography, he drafted a web map.
The criteria for this map were that it needed to be completely open source (without relying on any for-fee platforms) and self-contained—the project lives in a folder that could be dropped into any web server and would just work. This project uses LeafletJS and public base maps from Kentucky DGI.
The page departs from the traditional web map; marginalia, typically on a print map, was added to this map. A viewer can zoom into the legend! While the creative choices made on this project offered a fulfilling experience, students have their own trajectories and soon pivot interests after a course is finished.
The project is a draft, but it is active. Tell us what you think: https://outrageGIS.com/rowan
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Sample some of the scenes we enjoy from the areas we live and work.
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Is there a wall map of Sheltowee I wold love to have one. The new map is excellent !!
Hey thanks, Paul! We don’t have a wall map exactly. We have just unfolded sheets of the map. If we put the map at it’s current scale on the wall, it would be 25 feet tall.