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
Recent blog posts
Over the years we’ve pursued some measure that reveals the character of 900+ miles of trail here. Often we talk about a trail’s length or steepness with other dimensions gleaned from the base map. In this experiment, we are creating zones at discreet locations along trails and estimating the character of that location.
Over 14,000 polygons are shown on this 3D Mapbox map. The color indicates the type of scenery and height shows how much relief is the area. Future additions to this map include adding a searching tool and summary statistics for each trail.
Took an afternoon to GPS map the trail network at the West Sixth farm outside of Frankfort, Kentucky. You can download the map here https://www.westsixth.com/farmtrailmap.
The farm maintains a mountain bike trail with technical features and one-way trails. Enjoy a ride and then a brew.
As an experiment, we added a 3D map from a lidar point cloud viewable here: https://outragegis.com/pointclouds/w6.
Selected attributes symbolized from the North American extract: download.geofabrik.de/north-america.html
Visit the full-screen map.
I began teaching at New Maps Plus in October 2015. Students have made many awesome maps since then. This ‘map of maps’ shows projects going back to early 2017. Many of the early projects utilized CartoDB (now CARTO), which has evolved considerably over the years. While technology and visualization techniques change, a map is also an artistic pursuit and perhaps can withstand the ebb and flow of tech design styles.
Check out all posts in our blog.
Recent photos
Sample some of the scenes we enjoy from the areas we live and work.
Find more travel photos.
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