Pacific Crest Trail Extension: BC
Conclusions
Overall our analysis provided us with a trail that took into account the most important factors in creating a trail: land-use, slope, and proximity to human infrastructure. But ultimately, this trail should only serve as a rough guide for the extension due to a few key limitations:
- Data: Due to time constraints and the large study area, the use of a higher resolution dataset was not suitable. As a result, the raster cell size of 77 meters makes for a fairly coarse analysis in regards to a hiking trail. In the future, the trail should be broken into smaller segments and analyzed with greater resolution. These coarse cell sizes also have implications that result in all features having a minimum length and width of 77 meters. This is not appropriate for certain features such as rivers and roads. Furthermore, preferred hiking features such as narrow ridges and plateaus are not visible with the coarse raster size.
- Slope: According to the American National Parks Service, maximum slopes should usually not exceed 20 degrees for a hiking trail. While we set our maximum to 30 degrees, we felt this was necessary to account for trail building techniques such as switchbacking. By increasing this range, the trail avoided being so limited in its path. In future analyses, a function to incorporate switchbacking on slopes would be useful.
- Existing Trails: Obtaining data with existing trail network information would be of great use to this project. By attaching low friction costs to these trails, a path could be created that efficiently links pre-existing trails when possible.
- Forest Service Roads: Data on forest service roads would also prove helpful to finding additional access/resupply points, unfortunately no complete set could be found.
Again, this analysis should serve as a rough guide for the potential trail extension. Not only would higher resolution data improve this analysis greatly, but there are also certain obstacles which simply cannot be seen without being on the ground. Repeating this model for existing segments of the PCT would provide and interesting analysis to the validity of our methods.
National Park Service: http://www.nps.gov/noco/parkmgmt/upload/NCT_CH4.pdf