Spring weather is famously unpredictable, but your adventures shouldn’t be. Get maps that last. Our premium, laminated maps are made with a custom heat press for superior durability, guaranteeing they fold flat and stand up to any adventure.
To help you prepare for sudden downpours and muddy trails, we’re offering FREE SHIPPING on laminated map orders through May 31, 2026. Use code CAMP at checkout.
Peak camping season is officially here, and to help you plan your nights under the stars, we’ve mapped out key celestial events for the remainder of 2026. Below, you’ll find the perfect intersection of astronomical timing and trail-tested recommendations for your next overnight adventure. As always, bring a headlamp, carry your map, stay mindful of cliffs, and check the weather for clear skies before heading out.
| March 20: Spring Equinox |
| At the Spring Equinox, the sun rises and sets almost exactly due east and west. |
| Trail: Sky Bridge in the Red River Gorge |
| Camping: Koomer Ridge Campground |
| April 22: Lyrid Meteor Shower |
| The Lyrids are famous for bright “fireballs.” The moon will be a waxing crescent and set early, leaving a dark window for viewing. |
| Trail: Auxier Ridge in the Red River Gorge |
| Camping: Dispersed backcountry camping near Pants Grip Point. Make sure to follow all park regulations. |
| May 31: Blue Moon |
| Since May starts and ends with a full moon, the Blue Moon is your best chance for a classic moonlit sandstone hike. |
| Trail: Rough Trail in the Red River Gorge |
| June 15: Peak Milky Way |
| Mid-June offers the longest window to see the galactic center with the new moon. |
| Trail: Honey Creek Loop in the Big South Fork NRRA |
| Camping: Picket State Park Campground is in an official “International Dark Sky Park.” |
| July 29–30: Delta Aquariid Meteor Shower |
| The Southern Delta Aquariid Meteor shower will produce a steady of dozens of faint meteors each hour under dark skies. |
| Trail: Rock Bridge Trail in the Red River Gorge |
| Camping: Dispersed camping near Rock Bridge Recreation Area |
| August 11–13: Perseid Meteor Shower |
| This is the gold standard of meteor showers, producing 30–50 meteors per hour. 2026 is a perfect year because of a New Moon, so the sky will be as dark as possible. |
| Trail: Yahoo Falls in the Big South Fork NRRA |
| Camping: Alum Ford Campground |
| September 25–27: Harvest Moon |
| The Harvest Moon stays bright for several nights in a row, traditionally helping “hunters” navigate the woods, and it’s great for night hiking. |
| Trail: Ridge Trail to Pinnacle Overlook in the Cumberland Gap NHP |
| Camping: Gibson Gap Backcountry Campsite |
| October 21–22: Orionid Meteor Shower |
| These meteors are fragments of Halley’s Comet. They are known for being fast and leaving glowing “trains.” |
| Trail: Hensley Settlement in the Cumberland Gap NHP |
| Camping: Martins Fork Backcountry Campsite |
| November 16–17: Leonid Meteor Shower |
| Historically famous for meteor storms, the Leonids usually produce fast bright meteors with occasional fireballs. |
| Trail: John Muir Trail toward Laurel Fork Creek in the Big South Fork NRRA |
| Camping: Station Camp Campground |
| December 13–14: Geminid Meteor Shower |
| The Geminids are one of the most spectacular meteor showers can produce over 100 meteors per hour from debris of asteroid 3200 Phaethon. |
| Trail: Sheltowee Trace north of Cave Run Lake |
| Camping: Clear Creek Campground |
Another year stretches ahead, and with it, another chance to explore Appalachia. The trails shift dramatically with each season, offering new reasons to lace up your boots throughout the year. Spring wildflowers emerge from forest floors. Summer brings waterfalls at their coolest. Fall delivers brilliant reds and golds stretching between overlooks. Winter strips everything down to rock and sky, opening up expansive views.
The best adventures aren’t random; they’re timed. Catching peak wildflower bloom. Hitting the trail before summer crowds. Standing at cliff’s edge when fall color is at its peak. These are the moments that become your stories. Make 2026 a year of those moments. Pick your trails, mark your calendar, and hike out when the seasons deliver.
Our favorite hikes from 2025? Spring trails in the Red where mountain laurel blooms surrounded the trails, cool weather held, and sunshine lit up the forest. Those days reminded us what exists beyond the everyday—wilderness that pulls you out of your routine and shows you raw, natural beauty. We can’t wait to see it again in 2026.
Here’s to another year of memories on the trail. Happy New Year!
Skip the gift cards this season and gift the hikers, climbers, and explorers on your list something they’ll actually use…again and again. Check out our Winter Sale map deals and give the spirit of real adventure. Because the best gifts aren’t just opened—they’re experienced.
Coupons and offers cannot be applied to prior purchases. Valid on or before 11:59 EST Decebmer 31, 2025. TEE30 valid on up to two tees. Free Cumberland Gap map is not laminated. Other exclusions may apply.
Our Red River Gorge Trail Tee is the ultimate conversation starter and functional wearable. We brought it back by popular demand so you can now get the shirt that fellow hikers have literally tried to buy right off our backs.
This is the perfect gift for adventurers, climbers, or anyone who’s tried to explain why you’d drive for hours just to walk in the woods. Currently available in very limited quantities!
KyFromAbove released Phase 3 aerial photography, including oblique imagery, in Spring 2025. The images are available to download and are open data. However, finding the right set of images to download might be a task.
This viewer allows you to zoom in and see the available images for each exposure point, which takes 5 images: one nadir and four at cardinal directions. With 885,789 exposures, that’s over 4.4 million images, which range between 40 MB and 100 MB at roughly 10k x 15k pixels per image.
You can interactively search and download them through this website:
boydx.github.io/phase-3-oblique-centroids
You can interactively
The oblique images are hosted as TIFFs on a KyFromAbove AWS S3 bucket and can be previewed on mobile devices using modern browsers.
Below are some screenshots of the viewer and oblique images.
Can we detect changes in surface height over time, at a neighborhood scale? The changes in heights represent the loss and growth of trees, buildings, and other features of the built environment.
KyFromAbove has multiple phases of lidar point clouds for Kentucky as open data. In this interactive map of Lexington, Kentucky (inside New Circle), we demonstrate how to visualize and explore these changes in surface height between 2010 (Phase 1) and 2019 (Phase 2) lidar point clouds.
While most point clouds are colorized by aerial photography to give a realistic view of the surface, this project uses a different approach. Points are colorized by the amount of change in surface height between the two phases. The color scale is from red (decrease in height) to blue (increase in height). Both phases are shown simultaneously with the ability to toggle the visibility of each phase.
View the interactive Potree scene viewer (which is VR-enabled) through this website:
Below are some screenshots of the viewer focused on Kentucky Proud Park at the University of Kentucky campus.
Have you ever needed to create a quick GPS track, plot a few points on a map, and generate shareable spatial data on the fly in the field? This browser app utilizes your browser’s local storage to save GeoJSON features as you create them interactively, using your mobile device’s GPS or manually placing points. Your data is kept on your device and is never shared until you decide to export a GeoJSON file. The base maps in this app use KyFromAbove’s latest high-resolution aerial imagery and elevation data.
Start GPS mapping through this website:
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:
Oblique of Frankfort
Viewer interface
Viewer interface
Viewer interface
Oblique of Laurel Lake
Search by flight and shot ID
Attributes of image footprint centroid
Phase 1 decrease in height
Phase 2 increase in height
Phases combined
Phase 2 colorized with aerial photography
Viewer interface
Viewer interface
Viewer interfacee = (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 three phases of collecting high-resolution aerial imagery and elevation data. Over the last few weeks, we have made a four browser apps with MapLibre GL JS, Leaflet, and Esri JavaScript APIs that allow users to visualize and interact with the data from each phase. This page provides links to the apps:
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
Two new layers have been added to the web map for the Daniel Boone NF and Big South Fork NRRA: the National Land Cover Database (NLCD) for 2021 (mrlc.gov) and mined lands, 1985–2020 (skytruth.org). The NLCD is a 30-meter resolution (each cell is 30×30 meters) land cover dataset showing each cell’s dominant land use.
The cells are symbolized to show features significant for the area, such as multiple types of vegetation cover, the density of the built environment, and barren land. Inside the NF and NPS boundaries, barren land is likely to be exposures of bedrock, boulders, and earthen materials. For example, it shows Cumberland Falls. Outside of these boundaries, barren land is likely mines or construction sites.
While the layer is low-resolution compared to the aerial photography layer, the NLCD helps us quickly understand landscape conditions that would be tedious to interpret from aerial photography alone.
One can identify the distribution of basic forest types and habitat patterns. The NLCD can be useful for understanding the extent of the wildland-urban interface — a vital consideration for Trail Towns, maintaining wildlife corridors, and managing tourism development in the region.
The NLCD layer, in conjunction with other layers on the web map, provides a comprehensive view of the public lands in the region. Before your next trip to the Daniel Boone NF or Big South Fork NRRA, take a look at all layers to get a sense of the landscape you will be visiting.
Yahoo Falls Picnic Area is located in the Big South Fork National River and Recreation Area in Kentucky. The scenic area contains short hikes and overlooks of the Cumberland River and Yahoo Falls, an impressively tall waterfall. The area is surrounded by the Daniel Boone National Forest with a variety of trails and camping options. You can create a 9-mile loop hike by combining the Yahoo Falls Trail, Sheltowee Trace, and USFS 602 & 612 trails.
Backpacking tips. While no camping is allowed in the Picnic Area, Alum Ford primitive campground is about 2 miles south on the Sheltowee Trace. Big South Fork manages the campground and it is $15/night. There is no water or electricity at the campground and cellular service is weak along the Cumberland River. Hit me up for additional tips. Get lost and have a blast.
KyFromAbove Data Explorer