Or just anyone who is more knowledgeable about maps than I am?
If you click the link, it’ll take you to a map of some trails in Errington BC where I go hiking every day. If you look at 3 o’clock at the map there is a small, unnamed trail (brown coloured line) that heads across the river. Except there is NO TRAIL there and there certainly is no bridge or way to cross the river there either. All that’s there is a very steep cliff that goes down a couple hundred feet straight down to the river below.
If you put the map into satellite mode, this trail line vanishes. What the heck is it?? It’s driving me mad.
Perhaps the trail line on the map represents a trail that was there before the bridge washed away back in aught-four. The existence of a real trail on the ground on the far side of the river sorta implies there was a trail on the near side at one time as well.
Per this Google Earth view, there is definitely a feature along that route, on each side of the river. The gap in the trees might indicate the run of a stream with/or an old or informal trail route. Cartophile here.
When I click satellite it’s there but when I click back to the map the brown line disappears. It appears when clicking TF and appears as a dot/dash line in OSM. Maybe that accounts for the disappearing trick? I certainly see the eastern part of it on satellite.
If you follow it east to where it intersects the logging road, you can tell it’s definitely a road, although it looks like it’s gravel. If you zoom out using OSM or TF view, you’ll see approximately a bajillion other trails just like it to the east. On satellite, they all appear to be gravel or dirt. Many of them tend to weave through and around bare patches of dirt or dead end into a forest.
I would bet they’re logging trails. I can’t explain the cliff, but that river looks like it’s 99% rocks and 1% river, loggers would just drive through it.
ETA: I didn’t say it but I meant that the particular trail in question is probably an abandoned, overgrown logging trail.
Yeah there could be something on the other side of the river but there is certainly nothing on this side. I was just there again, today, with my gps and there’s no freaking path, just a long drop off the side of the cliff.
Your link takes me to the large bridge down river a bit. The part I’m talking about is further up the river. When I zoom down to it, there is no bridge, no log, nothing.
There are other paths that zigzag down the cliff before that. I may have to go down those and just walk along the river to that area.
The whole thing has been messing with my tiny, little head for days.
I’m in GIS and make these kind of maps both for online and printed.
My best guess is that it is a trail that is not part of the Hammerfest management folks.
When making these maps a cartographer GIS/tech will often take their own data, and overlay on an existing basemap. If you pan around a bit you will see other brown trails.
The layers table of contents where you should be able to turn different trails on and off is umm… a bit buggy. The legend does not show any brown trails which tells me it’s not part of the data set that maps the Hammerfest trail system. It’s the underlying basemap.
Best guess anyway, if I get some time, I can dig a bit deeper.
I agree with Quartz that the aerial view (if you zoom in) does look like a trail may be there.
I didn’t notice it earlier but look at the exact spot where the brown line crosses the river then switch to satellite. There’s something odd there. An old bridge?
OP needs to drive up the logging road from the other direction and turn off onto the brown line “road” and see where it goes.
Clicking OSM gives you a dotted line. If OSM is Open Street Map, that stands for a very generic Grade 4 “Path” in their legend. The solid brown line appears to be a part of the “TF” topographic layer but I can’t figure out what TF stands for.
ETA: D’uh, TF probably stands for TrailForks, the name of the damn website.
Actually, it looks like they are using two base maps. Google and perhaps BC version of USGS. It gets quirky when trying to turn Satellite on and off. One of the basemaps is not reloading.
I am thinking with my $.02 that it is an old logging road. It looks like the forest there is all equal height so maybe logging 30 years back or so. It explains the squiggle as it gains elevation up the hill - switchbacks. And I bet the the crossing was an old temporary bridge that was removed when the logging was done.
The overlap with the blue trail, Walrus Lower, should give you an indication as to what kind of trail exists on the other side of the river. And I bet it is a double track.
Odd. I see no dotted lines of any type in the legend. I’m looking at it in IE.
The ‘map’ is Scale Dependent as far as what layers can be turned on and off. IMHO, and the way it should be done is you should not have the option to turn on a layer, if if it won’t display at the scale that you are at. So forgivable, but a bit buggy.
If you click on the trail names, it shows the elevation and the Walrus trail that follows along the cliff/river is 267 meters. There are some trails (not on the map) that zigzag back and forth along the very steep cliff. I’ve been to the bottom and back up and my fitbit says it’s 68 flights of stairs up to the top.
There definitely isn’t a logging road that goes down to that area. I’ve hiked all of them around there and nothing on wheels would be able to get down there. It’s too steep and tree-covered to see down to the area I’m wondering about so I think I’m going to just go down another way and then walk (or try) to the area.
The river is quite high right now and there isn’t any sort of a beach, it’s all boulders along the river so I may have to wait till the level goes down in the summer.
Cartographer here. Hence the name! I’m a geography professor, but one of the classes I teach is “Maps and Society.” I’ve been obsessed with maps since I was a kid in the 70s, so I’ve observed (and participated in, sometimes) the amazing revolutions in GIS, free virtual globes like Google Earth and OSM, web mapping portals, making maps using data from “volunteered geographic information”… but a lot of the mapping I’m involved with is more or less “old school” – in fact, I’m typing this out in the forest villages of Yucatan, Mexico where I’m doing a little mapping with locals as part of a human geography research project. (Spring break for us).
Anyway, thanks for starting this thread – great to have dopers interested in cartography (there is at least one around here who has enjoyed much more of a cartography professional career than mine). I’ll check out your links, and the rest of the thread, as soon as I get a chance to.
Meanwhile, you might want to consider subscribing to the journal Cartographica, out of U Toronto – and I’m not just says by that because a map from an article of mine happens to grace the current issue! If you can afford it, the print version is much better than the online or PDF versions of this journal, I think.
Also check out the Strange Maps blog (the writer published a book a few years ago, too.)