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 explorations along the Kentucky River and shared use paths in the Bluegrass. We also wanted to focus on opportunities to enjoy our tree canopy since most of our surrounding countryside is dedicated to private pasture and farmland.

Our goal is to do good research and offer a free map here to use on your mobile device. We will focus on five 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.
5. Canoeing opportunities on our public streams.

Enlarge map: https://outrageGIS.com/maps/bluegrass

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.

360 photography at camp

This is the third year teaching at the UK NRES (Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences) summer camp. This course was a one-day GPS and GIS exercise to map the interpretive trails around base camp. With seventeen undergraduates and their mobile devices, we split into two teams. One team focused on the trail network and GPS mapped trail alignment and intersections. A second team mapped points of interests and interpretive sites along the main hiking trail up to the fire tower.

We worked in the camp classroom with QGIS, the leading free and open source GIS software, to make all of our maps. We imported our GPS data as KML or GPX formatted text files, which we then edited in QGIS. We created a shaded relief base map from DEM data (using the Terrain plugin!) over which we laid the cleaned trail data. We finally exported a GeoTIFF which could be loaded on mobile devices and used to locate position without requiring a cellular data connection.

Link to interactive map (6 MB)

We also touched on how to make interactive 3D maps. QGIS offers one of the richest environments to experiment with GIS data. We introduced a plugin, qgis2threejs, that is perhaps the easiest method to make online 3d maps. Take a look!

Robinson Forest Camp trail map

Last year, we GPS mapped the road to the fire tower. During the first year, we spent time making a static bird’s eye view of the main trail up to the fire tower. Since the first year, some students have asked about updating the map in the trailhead kiosk. It is a block diagram of the trail and its style is dated. This year, we discovered that theqgis2threejs QGIS plugin can make similar block diagrams. Maybe one year we can get one of these maps in the kiosk!

3D map with 2014 aerial photography (25 MB)

Dayton levee system

Dayton, Kentucky depends on a levee system to prevent flooding by the Ohio River. From this overlook at Eden Park in Cincinnati, Ohio, we can clearly see in the left half of the image how much the city is protected. The inside channel of the meander (the Kentucky side) historically had a much lower slope created by the mechanics of stream flow. As stream flow congested and slowed on the inside channel, sediment dropped from the river that mounded into a point bar and usable land.  However, periodic high river flows would inundate the whole point bar and the challenge became flood management. Dayton’s point bar was secured by this artificial levee system that is only so high. Our engineering of cities depends on knowledge of climate change.

We have created a zoomable photograph that you can use to inspect this levee:

Full-screen view of the photograph.

We’ve made a series of 3D views for Wolverine Publishing’s climbing guidebook for Boulder Canyon, Colorado. This image shows Eagle Rock and was made with high-resolution aerial photography and LiDAR elevation data. The data was supplied by Boulder Canyon Climber Community.

Students in NRE 355 (a GIS calass at the University of Kentucky Natural Resources and Environmental Sciences program) visited the 740-acre Pilot Knob State Nature Preserve on September 21, 2016, and used mobile devices to collect GPS data for the existing trail network. They mapped approximately 3.2 miles of trail then used ArcGIS and CARTO to measure the trails and create a 2D map and 3D visualizations of the nature preserve. Students then created websites to showcase their work.

http://sweb.uky.edu/~blshea1/nre355/pksnp contains maps, animations, and links to student pages.

3D views and animations of Pilot Knob State Nature Preserve