Time to explore the trails
Enjoy ruby flushed sunsets sweeping through hemlocks and fresh rhododendron blooms as you hike through murals of eroded sandstone. Our maps take you there.
If you’re planning on hiking in the Daniel Boone NF, Great Smoky Mountains NP, Cumberland Gap NHP, or in Kentucky state parks, we might have a map and digital geodata for you. Check out our shop for maps and data you can purchase online.
We aggregate data from the National Weather Service, National Park Service, and Dry Sky to serve weather stations to help hikers understand weather and road conditions for the Daniel Boone National Forest and Great Smoky Mountains National Park.
Time for a trip? Looking for a weekend in the woods, alone and untroubled by maintaining your boring social media accounts? Need to get lost for awhile? We understand that instinct and have maps to help. Consider wandering into a landscape of sandstone cliffs, river fords, and bear in the Big South Fork and North Daniel Boone Country.
Time to check the weather before packing your gear. Each of our stations (GRSM, CUGA, and DBNF) offer current weather observations, forecasts, webcams, archives, and climate information that updates every 15 minutes. Smell the mountain air, through the internet.
We have more weather mapping projects that we’re tinkering with. Check our GitHub repositiory that shows the radar for the Daniel Boone country and imagery from the GOES-16 satellite.
“Thus situated, many hundred miles from our families in the howling wilderness, I believe few would have equally enjoyed the happiness we experienced. I often observed to my brother, You see now how little nature requires to be satisfied. Felicity, the companion of content, is rather found in our own breasts than in the enjoyment of external things; And I firmly believe it requires but a little philosophy to make a man happy in whatsoever state he is. This consists in a full resignation to the will of Providence; and a resigned soul finds pleasure in a path strewed with briars and thorns.”
An account from Daniel Boone, 1784 from “The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone” (1784), by John Filson and Daniel Boone.
Visit the Great Smoky Mountains National Park with our GPS pack and GeoPDF
Recent blog posts
outrageGIS.com started in 1999 and has been continuously online since then. The first version of the website had this animated GIF. Check out the evolution of the site on the Wayback Machine.
While we are known for trail maps, we started mapping for video animation and broadcast graphics. You might remember your nightly local news in Kentucky and seeing maps—we might have contributed to that graphic.
In the early 2000s, we slung on a Trimble Pro XRS backpack GPS unit, outfitted a one-color offset press studio, and began printing spot and process color maps. Our first title was the Red River Gorge trail, a two-color map that we sold in local gas stations. We then printed titles for the Big South Fork, Great Smokies, Cumberland Gap, and the Daniel Boone National Forest. We did numerous contract maps for state parks and non-profits, and even an audio driving tour, The First Frontier Audio Driving Tour.
In 2008, Boyd started teaching at the UKy Department of Geography and accepted a faculty position in 2018. His work focuses on terrain modeling and topographic mapping using lidar data. Periodically, outrageGIS mapping is brought into the classroom to demonstrate web and digital media technologies.
Over the years teaching GIS & mapping, Boyd has tried to connect his students with real-world mapping opportunities. One such opportunity emerged when Rowan County, Kentucky, wanted an interactive map showing trails and tourism destinations in the area. Workshopping with students in GEO 305 (Elements of Cartography) and later MAP 672 (Programming for Web Mapping) in UKy’s Department of Geography, he drafted a web map.
The criteria for this map were that it needed to be completely open source (without relying on any for-fee platforms) and self-contained—the project lives in a folder that could be dropped into any web server and would just work. This project uses LeafletJS and public base maps from Kentucky DGI.
The page departs from the traditional web map; marginalia, typically on a print map, was added to this map. A viewer can zoom into the legend! While the creative choices made on this project offered a fulfilling experience, students have their own trajectories and soon pivot interests after a course is finished.
The project is a draft, but it is active. Tell us what you think: https://outrageGIS.com/rowan
Find high-resolution aerial imagery and shaded relief maps for Kentucky (and some for Tennessee) on SheltoweeTrace.com.
We’re adding new base maps for our Sheltowee Trace map. The current maps are:
- Default map shows a generalized shaded relief, hydrologic features, and public land.
- Aerial photography shows 2-ft pixel resolution, leaf-off 2019 imagery.
- Shaded relief (KY) uses KyFromAbove point clouds from 2010s to create a shaded relief detailed enough to show trail and road beds.
- Topographic (KY) shows the Topographic map series created by the Kentucky Division of Geographic Information.
- Topographic (Maptiler) displays a modifed Maptiler Outdoors base map. It is a global base map pulled a variety of open-source data. Trail and other information portrayed on this base map is not maintained by outrageGIS mapping. Also, elevation contours can show errors around 100 feet.
How much elevation gain did you have on your last Sheltowee Trace hike? We built a calculator and elevation profile on SheltoweeTrace.com.
The data used in the calculator is pulled from lidar point cloud elevations created in the mid-2010s. Digital elevation models (DEM) derived from these point clouds have a 5-ft spatial resolution and are detailed enough to show wider trails in shaded relief rendering of the DEM. The point elevations for the Sheltowee Trace are sampled every 1/10th of a mile and allow for calculating gains between mile markers with a single decimal place. The result shows both southbound and northbound gains.
In this web map, we explore how to use different elevation models in 3D maps. The KyFromAbove project collects and maintains high-resolution elevation data and aerial imagery for Kentucky. The bare-earth Digital Elevation Model (DEM) was created from a lidar point cloud. This is the typical elevation model that we use. The same point cloud was then filtered to create a Digital Surface Model (DSM) showing above-ground elevations, like buildings and trees. Both of these elevation models were converted to terrain tiles to use in web mapping applications. MapLibre GL JS 3D features terrain rendering with RGB-encoded elevation raster tiles.
The sliders allow the viewer to change the vertical exaggeration of the DEM and DSM. If geolocation is enabled, a track will record the viewer’s location. That track can be downloaded as a GeoJSON (works in Chrome).
Visit the page: outragegis.com/terrain-explorer/
This was a project in the UKy Geography MAP 675, a course in the department’s Digital Mapping MS graduate program. The aerial imagery and elevation data are from 2019.
We love hiking the Sheltowee Trace. Often, we want to know how much vertical elevation gain we have accumulated over a longer hike. To this end, we’ve added a cumulative elevation gain calculator to sheltoweetrace.com. Give it a try and tell us what you think.
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Sample some of the scenes we enjoy from the areas we live and work.
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