“Beermapping” is the self-taught personal project of a young resident of Chicago, a self-confessed beer drinker, and an obsessive lover of outdoor recreation. Mattias is not exactly your traditional beer drinker. He spends his time outdoors, visiting the woods near his house on weekends, hiking, shooting the hell out of zombies in World War Z, watching old horror films with his friends… mostly movies. He has discovered the pleasures of beermapping, though. After several failed attempts at mapping, he finally decides to use his beermapping software to help him create and save a world-class hiking trail for the public.
Beermapping is the art of mapping out hiking trails in the Great Lakes region by county and state. You can map rivers, trails, or mountains, but you need a good digital map. There is no easy way to do this. Once you have found some decent maps, you need to put them on paper to get a great representation of them as a landscape. This is how Mattias describes the process:
“So I’m in my house on Saturday night, and on Monday morning my son went on a canoe ride and came back with some drawings of the different trails we had been on. So I decided to make a list of all the places we had been and take it to a pencil and paper. The first one on the list was the Fox River. I put the name of the river in quotes because the first indication I got about being able to map a river was when my son started taking a canoe ride on it last week. Then I was able to do beermapping.”
One of the most important things that Mattias did in his process was find out which trails were in the best locations. He didn’t know anything about the park management, but once he sent off his map it was returned in a few days with a note attached saying that the trail was closed due to safety reasons. It was a pretty big shock because he had gone out to get a snack and came back to a closed trail! Fortunately he wasn’t too hurt but it still kind of messed him up.
So he made a few phone calls to the park ranger and a few other people to find out what was going on. When he got back to the house, though, there was more bad news. Because he didn’t know where the trail was, he hadn’t been able to get any information on where to park, or how to get there. He wrote a bunch of notes on the phone and then went back to the computer.
A couple of weeks later he came across a program called Open Roads. He downloaded it and was able to find all the waypoints he needed to get started beermapping. He was able to follow the trailheads, get detailed info on what the map looked like (like mileage, directions, etc.) and most importantly, put together his first Beermapping map. He could see exactly where he was supposed to be going, what was nearby and where to find other information about the area.
Since then he’s been building his own Beermapping system. Today he uses it to plan each leg of his travels. For example, he tells me that he’s about ready to hit Colorado, so he has his route planned out. He does the same for the West Coast and Eastern States. Now if he were to travel by car, he could already know which roads he should take.
If you’re thinking about taking your Beermapping to the next level, you can do so by getting a map software program like Beecher. Just make sure that it is fully featured. There are tons of great ones out there. I would stay away from some of the free ones and only get the full featured ones. You can pick them up at just about any store. Once you get them installed, you’ll have everything you need to get started mapping the roads of your region.
