Training Log Archive: Spike

I jogged around on the trails at Slough Creek. Nice day. I saw a tortoise on the trail.

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A post shared by @okansas on Oct 13, 2018 at 2:31pm PDT

Slough Creek update: I jogged the trails I hadn't been on and got GPS tracks. The tracks combined with the vegetation made it pretty easy to add the trail. The trail that heads east-west across the map doesn't get much use. I mapped it as an indistinct trail. My basic rule of thumb was if I was looking for the blazes to figure out where the trail went, rather than looking at the trail itself, then it was an indistinct trail. Where the trail crossed fields, I didn't draw it on the map.

I saw a few other features, like some ditches and a couple of hunter stands. I added those based on my memory and the lidar ground slope image.

Overall, the lidar-based vegetation is really good. It isn't perfect, but it is quite good.

And some non-Slough Creek notes....I figured out how to get the Microsoft building footprint data for Missouri. The geojson file is big. It didn't work through mapshaper.org. I tried using ogr2ogr in QGIS. That worked fine for small files (like Washington DC). I set the Missouri data to run overnight. When I woke up this morning QGIS had crashed at 4:22 a.m. and I got no results. I think it must be memory on my PC. So I read a bit online and decided to try mapshaper.org but using Firefox as my browser. And that worked!

I'm not really sure what I'll do with the building footprint data. It would be good for something like a big street O' map. It looks like the data is pretty good within Yellowstone, so I might make a couple of Yellowstone skiing maps.

Very short and easy jog on West Campus.

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Easy bike ride on the bike paths with Mary. She was tired from yesterday and we took it extra easy. Fun.

Almost cold! I wore long pants a jacket and gloves.

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Slough Creek update: Still distracted by the building footprint data. I figured the thing to do was open the data in QGIS and then add a polygon layer and clip out a smaller area. But, opening the data in QGIS for Kansas seems to run my PC out of memory or something. I can open a small file, like D.C. without much trouble. I was able to open Kansas and added a polygon. But as soon as I moved the mouse to the menu to clip the vector layer my PC froze.

I tried something else and this worked. I put the data in mapshaper.org. The raw data is geojson. The mapshaper.org page lets you export the data as a shapefile. That worked pretty well. I used Kevin Shipley's old copy of Global Mapper to clip out a bit of the shapefile and then can easily open it in Open Orienteering Mapper. Success!

Like a real Fall day! Low 50s and some color on the trees. It was nice. I shuffled around a bit.

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Slough Creek update: I was going to spend some time adding vegetation boundaries. But I got distracted by the building footprints data:

https://www.attackpoint.org/discussionthread.jsp/m...

I started with Kansas and had some problems. Maybe the data is just too large for my PC to handle? I downloaded Washington DC and the state of Wyoming. I was able to open both of those. The Microsoft data is ok, but not as detailed as good data on OSM. On the other hand, it is a lot better than places where nobody has added any buildings on OSM.

Rolled around on the bike paths and made it to the store and home before the rain.

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Trail run from the east side of Rockhaven. I carried a map and looked at it quite a bit. I gave some thought to the January 1 event at Rockhaven. There are a few little changes to trails where a tree fell and the horse riders have re-routed the trail a bit.

Weather was mid-50s and steady rain. It felt pleasant. The trails were in good shape, but rocks were slippery and on some of the uphills the mud was slippery.

This was my first run of the season on the south shore trails at Clinton. I usually do my first run of the season a little too early (when there's still too much vegetation), but this seemed just right. It probably helped to start at Rockhaven rather than Rockcrusher. The trails get more consistent use at Rockhaven.

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