I want to talk about how to name the trails in Catoctin Mountain Park, a US national park in Maryland. The available information about trail names is a bit inconsistent. This post serves as a way for me to organize my thoughts and document the conclusions I’ve reached.

Background

Catoctin Mountain Park, as I mentioned, is part of the US National Park system. It’s located in Maryland, at the northern end of the Blue Ridge Mountains and the outer perimeter of the Appalachian Mountains. It has a number of hiking trails. The trails are split between the east and west sides of the park; each side’s trails are interconnected, but the two sides don’t connect directly to each other.

I recently hiked most of the east side trails. It’s those trails I’m primarily focused on. I haven’t (yet) been to the west side, so I don’t personally know the ground truth there.

Ground Truth

On the ground, trails are designated by colored blazes on trees. The blazes use a number of different colors and several different shapes. Some distinct trails use the same colors as each other, but use different blaze shapes. There are sections where two trails overlap; those sections uses blazes that are half the color of one trail and half the color of the other trail.

There are no trail names posted, with one exception. A trail between the visitor center and the Lewis Property part of the park is both blazed with white rectangles and has regularly-placed signs saying “Gateway Trail”.

The park generally uses rectangular blazes for longer trails that form the core of the east side’s trail network. Triangular and circular blazes are used for shorter trails that either form shorter connections or have a specific purpose. For example, there’s a short nature trail with signs pointing out local plant species. That trail is blazed with triangles.

… See full entry

I came across this section of an Interstate today:

Notice how the Interstate looks a little like it’s been draped across the terrain’s ridges and valleys? That’s probably because the road was originally traced from non- (or not fully) orthorectified imagery. (From perusing the history of the way’s geometry, it looks like the culprit was someone in the US Census Bureau; the waviness was there in the TIGER import.)

I matched the geometry up to Maryland’s six-inch imagery (which is, in my experience, excellently aligned and rectified) with this result:

… See full entry