Yesterday I returned to the world of recreational hiking and have started a personal project to update the trail maps of the Conestoga Trail System in Lancaster County , Pennsylvania. I’ve added a new category on my site just for this project and you’ll see my progress (or lack thereof) posted here over this summer.

My goal: hike the 63 mile length of the trail and map it with my Magellan MAP330mGPS and then generate a series of new trail maps that are more accurate than the existing set. When the project is complete I hope to have a downloadable series of pdf maps as well as route data that will be downloadable to common GPS models. Along the way I’ll generate point and line shapefiles that will be usable in any of the ESRIArcview/ArcMap product families.

The Conestoga Trail System is officially maintained by the Lancaster Hiking Cluband my efforts are in no way endorsed by the club, in fact I haven’t even exchnaged an email with them as of yet. Once I have some work product I’ll touch base with them and see what if any support they can give me. Hopefully someone out there already has a start on GPS routes of the trail….

I already have downloaded, imported, and corrected the data from yesterday’s hhke and I’ll post more about that soon.

If you have some personal interest in this project, feel free to email me at mike [at] thenewmans [dot] us.