Pacific Crest Trail Extension: BC
The outcome of our cost path analysis was generally what we were hoping for. The trail begins in Manning Park and avoids the urban area of Vancouver by moving up the Fraser Canyon before heading west towards Garibaldi Provincial Park. It then continues in a north-easterly direction, passing through Tsilos and Tsweedsmuir Provincial Parks, before ending in Bella Coola. The trail avoids passing through roads unless it is absolutely necessary and does not pass through any major water bodies, mining sites or urban areas, which shows our success in weighting each frictional surface. Our trail goes through mostly forested and alpine areas and passes over a few glaciers and ice areas as well as small streams when necessary. In addition, the trail comes in close proximity to various roads that can serve as additional access points between each point of interest.
Results
The total trail length came out to be 860 km. As this should take a hiker anywhere from 30 to 40 days to complete, the length of the addition would be reasonable for most hikers who arrive in BC in September. The distances between each point of interest are long, at approximately 250km, though there are many opportunities to access roads between these points.
By converting our trail into a KMZ file, we are able to examine in conjunction with satellite terrain imagery using Google Earth. The file is available for download below! In many areas it can be seen that the trail ascends some fairly steep slopes, we account for this by assuming switchbacks will be used when necessary. Unfortunately we were not able to incorporate switchbacking into our analysis. By picking a slope angle that was higher than appropriate for a typical hiking trail, we were able to expand the suitable area, assuming switchbacks would minimize the grades in many of these situations. We acknowledged that with 77m cells the slopes will not be highly accurate, but will produce a mean for all the slopes in that one cell. Many suitable areas for hiking, such as narrow ridges or plateaus with width under 77m would thus be given a much greater slope than in reality. This was our reasoning in choosing a slope that was steeper than what a hiking path would normally entail.
Throughout our analyses we acknowledged several aspects of our project that would need to be improved on if it were to be used to find the most suitable path for an extension of the PCT. The DEM would have to have a much higher resolution. Due to the fact that we were looking at a large area, a higher resolution DEM would have taken a great deal of time to generate Path Distance surfaces. We would also have liked to include provincial parks and current hiking trails in our land use layer by giving them a very low frictional value. However, data for each was not readily available.
Click the file below to view the trail in Google Earth!!! Make sure you have installed Google Earth first...
Red Line indicates the Existing Trail ~ Green Line indicates the Extension Trail
Existing Trail File from PCTA.org