New England Trail

More info coming on the NET!

I thruhiked the New England Trail (NET) in September 2017 and working on a guidebook featuring the waypoints plotted against an elevation profile. While on trail I meticulously recorded water sources, parking, powerlines, scenic views, shelters, road crossings, and anything I found interesting. This includes marking gps waypoints, taking photographs, merging with online GIS data, and manual review of accuracy.

It is a lot of work to format the data and it is ongoing. The track files need to have breaks, detours and errors removed. Waypoints need to have readable comments added. Some parts of the software for generating the guidebook still need to be written. However, in the interest of sharing as much as possible, and getting feedback, I will share some of my work in progress. At the moment, the data to share is largely complete sets of GPS tracks in GPX format.

I have a rough guide available. It’s now a single PDF. I still need to implement more intelligent code for shifting text so it doesn’t crash or run off the side. The waypoint density is still too high. I need to merge or delete more waypoints to focus on the most important data.

A word of caution! The water locations marked should not be considered reliable sources. These are places I found water in September 2017. I’d be happy to hear back if any of the sources run completely dry so I can mark them unreliable.

NET “Main” Track – From the Long Island Sound to the NH/MA border
NET Main

NET “Spur” Track – From the junction of the Mattabesett and Menunkatuck Trails near Broomstick Ledges to the Connecticut River
NET Spur

Waypoints – Condensed waypoints with text descriptions added to the “Comment” field. Many trail junctions have been removed and some nearby trail features merged into a single waypoint.

Main – NET Main Waypoints
Spur – NET Spur Waypoints

Guide – Full guide PDF, pages 22+ are of the Spur, currently includes the the distance of the Connecticut River crossing.
New England Trail v0.2

Software – The software script is up on github. Much more work will be coming in the future. ProfileMaker