Navigating Hitchcock Woods

OpenStreetMap

I currently recommend OpenStreetMap for navigating Hitchcock Woods. If you like what you see on the website, check out Organic Maps for Android or iPhone for your navigational needs in Hitchcock Woods.

Much of the woods was not covered by OpenStreetMaps a few months ago, but after posting the GeoTIFF in February, I started using that as a template to complete the trails of Hitchcock Woods. Over the past two months, I've walked most, but not all, of these trails and my contributions reflect what I see. A few trails have been closed by signage or are too washed out to walk. Some other new trails and firebreaks have been made and intersections between trails reshaped. Some commercial hiking apps such as Gaia and AllTrails copy OpenStreetMap trail data occasionally, so if you are user of one of those applications, you might find your coverage of the woods greatly expanded.

GeoTIFF Map

The file above contains a map of the Hitchcock Woods in Aiken, South Carolina. It is copy of the Map of the Woods found on the website of the Hitchcock Woods Foundation as a PDF. GeoTIFF is a common format for the distribution of orthorectified imagery and, in addition to being viewable by common image software as a TIFF file, can be accurately overlaid on maps using software which can read its additional geographic information. This file has been successfully used for live navigation with the following hiking navigation apps. It ought to work with others. E-mail me if you've had success with your prefered navigational app that I can add to this list.

• Gaia GPS on Android
• Avenza Maps on Android

I produced this file with QGIS roughly following instructions found here. I grabbed Lat/Lon coordinates from Google Maps for road intersections appearing in the map and used a Python script to render these to projected map coordinates in meters.