Wilderness HPs List

[John Kirk]

Anyone interested in helping me put together a list of all the Wilderness HPs in the US?

[JoeGrim]

Sure. If you haven't started working on Colorado yet, I can do that. Or I can do WY. The boundaries are somewhat coarse on the National Atlas page, so there might be uncertainty when high points lie at or near wilderness boundaries. One example of this is the Neota Wilderness, where the high point is on the east slope of Iron Mountain. In cases like this, I can use Nat. Geo Trails Illustrated maps to check in more detail. Also, if a coarse boundary appears to follow a ridgeline, I can use the actual ridgeline on the topo map as truth.

[JoeGrim]

One example of this is the Neota Wilderness, where the high point is on the east slope of Iron Mountain.

I checked and it turns out the high point of Neota is actually Thunder Mountain, 30' higher than pt. 12030 on the east slope of Iron Mtn.

[DSunwall]

I have a topo file of the wilderness boundaries, entire usa. it is over 600kb. There are GPX files out there, I imported them into Topo.
Note (put in by John K): FILE IS NOW HERE

[John Kirk]

I don't understand the url code, what do I have wrong?

Looks like you have an extra bracket in there. I fixed it.

Thanks a bunch Dwight. The polygonal accuracy is a bit lacking in the file (LCW for example as you mention has the boundaries on the quad for comparison, but it gets me thinking there is probably a .shp (shape file) out there that has tremendous accuracy.

[DSunwall]

I think it is off a bit in places, might cause a few problems.


I don't know all the names myself, it would take some research.........time

isn't there a way to have text underlined that has a link embedded?

[John Kirk]

I think it is off a bit in places, might cause a few problems.


I don't know all the names myself, it would take some research.........time

isn't there a way to have text underlined that has a link embedded?

The URL code doesn't work that well for that - maybe I'll look into changing the scripts.

For now, you could use actual html:

Code: Select all

<a href="http://linkofyourchoosing.xyz">Text to describe it</a>

looks like this:
<a href="http://linkofyourchoosing.xyz">Text to describe it</a>

[TWorth]

Looks like it has already been done for the western states(here's CO):

Couldn't hurt to fact check these, I do see one very minor error(Service Creek should be Sarvis Creek)

[John Kirk]

Not surprising - I thought I might have seen something before. At least there is still work to be done and I agree on the fact-checking.

I did find a file for Wilderness Boundaries:
http://nationalatlas.gov/atlasftp.html#wildrnp

Too big for Excel - had to port into MS Access. I'll share a TOPO! file when I get a chance to parse all of it.

[JoeGrim]

Once you find the best source for getting the boundary coordinates, let me know which state you would like me to start working on.

By the way, I don't have Topo!. I use Topofusion and my Garmin Mapsource Topo 2008 software instead. Let me know if that's going to be a problem.

[DSunwall]

FYI
I got the GPX files for the boundaries from TopoFusion.

You may have them already? under Window/GIS Layers you can download them.

[John Kirk]

By the way, I don't have Topo!. I use Topofusion and my Garmin Mapsource Topo 2008 software instead. Let me know if that's going to be a problem.

Not sure - depends on what you can do with delimited arrays of names and coords for peaks and boundaries...

[JoeGrim]

Not sure - depends on what you can do with delimited arrays of names and coords for peaks and boundaries...

I can convert these to GPX, but I have to use Excel to put in all the tags. Definitely a time-consuming process. I wish I knew of a better way short of buying Topo!

[John Kirk]

Here's a page to pull down bounding coords for all Wilderness Areas in the US:

Link removed - see this link for a much better set of boundaries:
http://www.joeandfrede.com/colorado/wil ... oundaries/

[John Kirk]

Well, after all that, it looks like the data points match Dwight's converted GPX file exactly, so it was already using the USGS source. I wonder why the National Atlas interactive map appears to be more fine-grained...