Hi all,

Ok, this is cool!

Here are about 300 placemarks which show the location of every single overnight shelter, cabin, or lean-to along the entire length of the Appalachian Trail. Although I don't have the GPS data to draw the actualy centerline of the trail, the shelters are close enough that it's an easy matter to see where it goes! What's more is that you can right click on any placemark to see notes about the shelter, whether or not there is a fee to stay there, the capacity it holds, who maintains the shelter, etc.

It's quite a lot of data and of course I did not do it by hand.

I used the suggestion in this post to do it. The Appalachian Trail website makes the data available -- I imported it into Microsoft Access as a table and generated a report with all the appropriate XML tags. If anybody is interested, I might be able to make the Access file available so that everybody can see how it is done. In all, I was able to import all 300 placemarks with the proper descriptions in less than 30 minutes and that includes the time it took to set up the Microsoft Access report. Very convenient indeed!

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

Take care,

Rocky

BTW, in the description of each shelter, if the capacity reading indicates "zero", it indicates that the information is not available.