In early August, spent three days backpacking in the Dolly Sods, a beautiful and unusual wilderness area in West Virginia. Highly recommended, especially if you want fresh blueberries in your oatmeal.

For maps, I downloaded OSM data to my Garmin. It was only partially complete. Searching, I found maps at http://www.jtphillips.com/DollySodsMaps/, good comprehensive mapping of Dolly Sods. Way back in 2004, they created maps using only GPS and open source software (sounds familiar :). I downloaded and image and printed it out for use on the trail.

After I got back I wanted to update OSM with a few of my tracks. I contacted a few of the previous mappers in Dolly Sods, as well as reaching out to the Dolly Sods Mapping site. Fantastically, John supported us using their data in OSM. To start, I converted the DollySods KML map to raw OSM data, using gpsbabel, and brought it into JOSM as a background layer, to compare to existing OSM data.

Fantastically, John was able to upload the GPS data to OSM, and then (joined in mapping!)[osm.org/user/johntrudy/edits]

At this point

• all of the trails in Dolly Sods have been better aligned to the GPS traces and to the Bing satellite
• trails were connected properly into a network
• tagging is consistent
• some data that was imported with TIGER was fixed up (removed tiger:reviewed)
• tagged the boundary of DollySods with additional tags ala osm.wiki/Tag:boundary=protected_area
• added Red Creek
• adding parking areas

There’s always more mapping to do, maybe later…

• a more comprehensive survey of campgrounds
• add more water features
• add trail numbers

This was great fun. Looking at the imagery after our trip was a great way to see it again. Hope I get to do more backpacking and mapping soon.

-Mikel