Trails and hikes along the Kentucky River and in the greater Lexington area.

We’re excited to start compiling great hikes near Lexington and along the Kentucky River. Often we feel compelled to travel long distances to find natural areas to enjoy. While the Daniel Boone and Big South Fork forests provide multiday excursions, we can find challenging day hikes along Kentucky River. If we do a little research, we can find

Our goal is to do good research and offer a free map here to use on your mobile device. We will focus on four types of trails.

1. Rugged and remote trails along the Kentucky River where on can explore the unique ecosystem of the Palisades.
2. Shared-use trails that connect different parts of a city and provide opportunities to explore the urban edges.
3. Walking trails, which are typically paved, that families can use to exercise and take a break from street sidewalks.
4. Bike trails in the area, which are typically mountain bike and technical, but try to suggest trails that young cyclists can use for off-road fun.

We will publish the full map soon, so keep tuned. You can follow our explorations on Pixel’s Travels.

Here is 360 photo of the John Holder Public Trail in the Lower Howard’s Creek Nature Preserve.

Town Branch Trail in maps

Students create many maps and a website for the soon-to-be-built Town Branch Trail during the Spring 2017 semester in the GEO 409 (Advanced Topics in GIS) in the Department of Geography, University of Kentucky. We used mainly open source GIS software QGIS and GitHub to create and publish our maps.

We used mainly open source GIS software QGIS and GitHub to create and publish our maps. For the final project, students grouped into separate teams for web page production, field GPS and photography, story production, and 3D mapping.

An interactive map of the content produced for the final project can be found in the following map:

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Locate yourself on the ST

We’ve updated our map of the Sheltowee Trace on our ST site: sheltoweetrace.com/hike. The map has symbols for official recreation sites and trails for the Daniel Boone National Forest, Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area, and Cumberland Falls and Natural Bridge State Resort Parks. Of course, it has the ST and mile markers from the northern terminus.

Since we deployed this map last year, we have updated the Leaflet and MapBox JS to make the work with a GPS-enabled device as long as you have a cellular data connection. The points of interests and trails are clickable with useful travel information.

Our next goal is to fill out the map with more scenic destinations and include more photographs. Let us know if you have any suggestions.

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