Northwest Trails — Trail Maps for the GPS

I had run across information about Northwest Trails a couple of months ago but there were no maps available for this far corner of South Eastern Washington so I did not pay it much attention. When traveling over to the Missoula Cache Machine we located a couple of caches that were along trails included in this project. In the same way that road maps on the GPS increase its usefulness by a factor of 10, so being able to see the trails that give the best route to the cache increases the usefulness of the GPS even more.

Northwest Trails, according to its web page, is a community effort designed to record and collect GPS data for trails in Washington, Idaho, Oregon, Montana, Wyoming, British Columbia and Alaska and use that data to create custom trail maps for Garmin GPSs. The Northwest Trails map is “transparent”, which means the trails appear as data laid over the top of any other map loaded into the GPS. Trail types are are broken into four types:

• Main Trails: red dotted lines
• Minor trails (game traces, etc.): thin red dotted lines
• Paved trails: maroon dotted lines
• Unpaved roads: maroon dashed lines

With enough user input, the map coverage will hopefully expand to include GPS-verified coverage of all trails located in the Pacific Northwest. To help with this I have submitted my first map, the Audubon Nature Trial in Kennewick’s Columbia Park. I have overlaid the trail and waypoints on Google Earth below.