Geek Challenge — animate your planned hike

30,000 bonus points for a website where I could enter our crew’s Philmont camp names for a specific trek and get a video out.

The KML files have not been updated, but they are a good starting point: https://www.philmontscoutranch.org/philmonttreks/facilities/gis/

If your itinerary doesn’t map to one from 2017, I would load the points and the routes into Google Earth and map your route.  Then, use Google Earth’s fly-through mode to create what you are looking for.

Open Street Map (aka OSM, and thus CalTopo) have ALMOST all of the Philmont campsites marked. You have to zoom in to see them, so you need to at least be in the right area to find some of them.

OSM (and its derivatives Open Cycle Map and TF Outdoors) have almost all of the Philmont trails as well. The trails to Garcia Cow and Lovato are not in the official GIS KML download, nor are they on OSM. My crew is going to Garcia Cow on itinerary 7, and the other crew from my troop on itinerary 27 are staying at Lovato one night.

The good news is, http://www.PhilTrek.com has accurate Lat-Long coordinates for every camp, so I was able to add Lovato to my troop’s map. The trail to get there remains a mystery. PhilTrek has decent non-downloadable approximations of the trails from every camp to the next camp. Their trail or camp “in-use” and “not-in-use” listings are not 100% accurate (see Lovato and Garcia Cow).

There are a few new camps or re-opened camps this year.  Good stuff!

Doarama changed name to Ayvri, and appears to be very “pay-to-play”.

I uploaded a sample KML-turned-GPX file from Lovers Leap turnaround to Lovers Leap Camp, and got a non-intuitive animation player that seemed to only allow adjusting the time and play-back speed. I was also able to zoom in and out. I did not manage to find a way to manually change my viewpoint over the terrain.

The terrain looked nice, but the utter lack of info and paywall turned me off completely.

There are well-documented tools that still work with/in Google Earth Pro, which has been free for several years now.

“CesiumJS” appears to be the “new hotness” in 3D globe visualization, but I haven’t tried using it – yet..

There is a beautiful NASA -developed tool called “World Wind” that I toyed with a few years ago. It is for programmers and NOT consumer friendly/ready.

Accumulating the trails info in a user-friendly and multi-platform arrangement is the log-jam to being able to make your animations “quick and easy”. As I said here or the other digital file thread, the PSR-supplied file is “the gospel” if you want accurate distances and placement. But the trails are in small segments with wonderful names like “1.1357289”.

If you aren’t worried about every inch of distance, tracing trails in CalTopo and giving them a name that you understand like “Lovers Leap to Miners Park” will give you “good enough” trails to view in Google Earth or other visualizers.

Someone comfortable using Garmin and other GPS software can grab the Philmont data at “GPS File Depot” mentioned here or in the other thread.

This is pretty cool too

3D printed Philmont Topography from philmont

I love the idea of preparation! I like the prep stuff so much we took at all adult autumn adventure for a week in 2016 prior to our two crews going out for a 12-day trek in 2017. Great experience, especially for those who have never been to Philmont.

Looking at the trails on Google Earth, or other visual representations is a good idea for determining how difficult of a hike you’ll have between camp. However, a LOT of the itineraries for 2019 go into the Valle Vidal. Any trek that has Baldy Mountain as a side hike are “northern” treks. We have itinerary 23, that was our scout’s first choice. That involves several days in the Valle Vidal where there are limited trails and you can pick your own path. So….if you have a lot of time spent in the Valle Vidal up north figuring out the exact route from one camp to another might be a waste of time. You might find when you get out there that what you saw on Google Earth, etc. isn’t how you want to go or the scouts want to go another route.

I’m not saying looking at the maps, 3D tools, etc. aren’t a good idea. I’ve already done that, as have other adults, for our itinerary. Just keep in mind that what you find on the map(s) might not reflect reality when you are on the ground. :-)

Jamie.

617-T1

Yes, all bets are off in the true LNT areas like Valle Vidal. Floods, animals, and walking abreast across open meadow keep that area “untamed”. I know I saw a YouTube clip showing a flash flood inundating a meadow somewhere on the ranch and opening up a serious ditch right through it.

The new camps – definitely need to be flexible about those, too.

But most Southern routes are much more constrained, and the end points aren’t really allowed to shift.

https://www.philmontscoutranch.org/resources/gis/

For anyone still paying attention, PhilTrek.com just posted revised location data for a few of the 2019 camps. I updated the CalTopo starter map. The URL is unchanged, but it won’t auto-update on YOUR map. The map is a mixture of the official 2017 PSR GIS file and PhilTrek.com data, along with some from OpenStreetMap. All sources are noted in comments for a location.

https://caltopo.com/m/PP96

Thanks. Loading it in Gaia.