This site is two things:

1. A resource for those wanting to document their community walking trails on Google Maps and/or Google Earth, to share them with the rest of their local community.
2. A repository for such trail maps in Carlisle, Mass (USA) and Chelmsford, Mass. (USA) (so far).

Here is an example:

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Chelmsford Thanksgiving Forest in Google Maps

The main focus audience for these maps is local people who like to take long walks and want to go somewhere. These maps make it easy to find a combination of trails and roads, perhaps spanning multiple conservation areas.

With the help of the Carlisle Trails Committee, we have a pretty good draft of Carlisle finished. I have also started on Chelmsford, Mass. I will be expanding outward from there.

I build the maps by loading tracks from a GPS receiver into Google Earth. Hopefully, as time goes by, town trails committee or conservation commission members might want to do some or all of the work themselves, chime in about trail names and format, help me locate special points of interest or obscure trails, or be involved in some other way. The maps you see posted on this web site are just stakes in the ground to get the process started.

For now, I am making maps for both Google Earth and Google Maps. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages.

Google Maps is very familiar and easy to use. However, it loads the trails slowly and has a limited feature set (it is more difficult to determine the length of a planned walk). Google Maps runs entirely online.

Google Earth is faster and has a fuller feature set. It requires the user to download software to use it.

Both packages are limited in their printing abilities. The easiest way to print is to take a screen capture and paste it into a photo editor. I like to do this from Google Maps with the satellite overlay turned off to get a simple printout that uses less ink.

I also plan to include here simple instructions for building community trail maps. I hope that the idea will spread among community trail committees, and that we someday will have a nice set of interconnecting maps! This will require solving the printing problem, and perhaps always recommending the use of Google Earth.

--Lisa Huntington