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Category: outdoors

Down the OpenStreetMap Rabbit Hole

Published May 25, 2012

I’ve been interested in making mountain bike trail maps for a while now, resulting in my drawing the official River Bends and Addison Oaks maps. Stony Creek Metropark has some great trails as well, but it’s MTB trail map is unfortunately lacking. It is missing some segments used during races, has some one-way markings that don’t match what’s actually signed on the trail, and isn’t geographically accurate enough to be used for trail planning.

My original intention was to record all of the trail segments at Stony Creek myself using a GPS then draw a map similar to the ones for Addison Oaks and River Bends, but after looking on OpenStreetMap (OSM) I found that most of the trails at Stony Creek were already mapped. Thus if I am willing to license my map in an appropriately open manner I can use this data, saving myself a bunch of time.

Since a few small connectors that I wished to include were missing I headed out to Stony Creek this evening and recorded GPS data for only the missing segments. Most of these were connectors used primarily during races, but as they are passable throughout most of the year I wanted to include them. I then brought the GPX into JOSM, edited the map, and submitted the changes. This is a pretty easy task if one is familiar with basic CAD tools.

While the changes aren’t yet reflected in the main online map, the changes have been submitted and it does show when new data is manually downloaded, so I imagine it’s only a matter of time before it’s visible to the public. I will then use this OSM to make my MTB-specific map, complete with markers for things such as log piles, rock gardens, etc.

I suspect that this ease of editing is going to change my mapping workflow in the future. There’s a very good chance that any new maps which I do will first go into OSM, then this data will be pulled out to generate the actual map. Barring any license constraints, of course.

Looking further it appears that River Bends’ trails aren’t yet on OSM. Looks like I’ve got some work to do there as well…

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Poopy Creek

Published May 17, 2012

This is one of my least favorite parts of riding outdoors: unexpected encounters with dog poop. Not only is it feces, but being dog stuff it’s greasy and difficult to clean off. I must have picked this up somewhere at Stony Creek last night while riding. After getting in the car I thought it smelled suspiciously unclean in there, but I’d just written it off as sweaty clothes or my nose playing tricks on me.

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Black and White Lane Markings on M-59

Published May 17, 2012

A couple of days ago while driving on M-59 between M-53 and I-75 I noticed that the white dashed highway lines had been augmented with black rectangles on the distant (furthest away from you) side. I had a few theories about what these may be for, but the reality turned out to be a bit more mundane yet effective: additional marking to increase contrast on areas where sun glare is a problem, particularly on light-colored road surfaces.

This section of road was recently replaced with the new surface being all concrete, so it has a fairly light colored surface. When wet and/or with a bit of glare the markings practically disappear, as the embedded contraflective additives don’t really work, or reflect the same amount of light as the road surface.

I’d originally thought (and somewhat hoped) that these were augmenting existing markings to facilitate machine vision used by autonomous vehicles. Others suggested to me that they may be IR reflective to make markings more visible to night vision equipment. There was also the chance that it was a boondoggle to adjust the lane marker length to some standard.

This question was posed to Ask Metafilter and Facebook, email was sent to MDOT to ask, and I started doing some research. The most conclusive answer I could find was the augmentation of colored (white, in this case) markings to increase their visibility. Specifically, section 3A.05 of the Manual on Uniform Traffic Control Devices, 2009 Edition, Revision 2 states:

Black may be used in combination with the colors mentioned in the first sentence of Paragraph 1 where a light-colored pavement does not provide sufficient contrast with the markings.

and

When used in combination with other colors, black is not considered a marking color, but only a contrast-enhancing system for the markings.

I also eventually received a reply from MDOT stating:

The markings are part of a pilot project aimed at helping motorists see pavement markings during certain times of day when the suns glare/reflection is strong. The black outlines the white making the markings more prominent.

and

As I understand we will be putting more out on MDOT’s road in the next few years in locations where visibility by the sun is diminished.

So, that answers it. These markings are simply to increase contrast and improve visibility against the light colored concrete surface.

UPDATE: A photo of these lane markings can be see in this post.

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Satan Can’t Punctuate

Published May 3, 2012

Lunch time today found me taking a quick ride at River Bends, and while there I came across this dumpster. Graffiti reading “Satan Was Here” on a dumpster doesn’t really surprise me, but the quotation marks surrounding the upside down cross do. Has the moronic use of quotation marks purely for emphasis really gone this far?

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Fox Lake Road May Be Impassable

Published April 22, 2012

Yesterday’s ride took Erik, Nick, and I out west to visit an area that we’d only heard about and Erik was anxious to see, Fox Lake Road. I was not disappointed, as the segment between Honert Rd and County Line Rd. / Washburn Rd. was some nice hills in the quite-attractive Ortonville Recreation Area.

Starting out from the Clarkston Road crossing of the Paint Creek Trail we ended up around 69 miles for the day, and a moving time of just a smidge over 5.5 hours. This met my goal, but I seem to have failed to keep my heart rate high enough for some parts of the ride. For much of it (likely while climbing) I had it fairly high, but on the flatter segments (and likely longer downhills) it dropped lower than I should have kept it. Hopefully this’ll be okay… While tired I had enough energy left at the end of the ride yesterday to make a decent effort on the Miller Rd. hills, so hopefully I won’t have problems with next weekend’s 5.5 – 6 hour ride, and whatever comes after that…

Here’s two more photos from yesterday:

· Inside the Men’s changing area at Bald Mountain State Recreation Area’s Lower Trout Lake beach.
· Titus Racer X 29er laying in some leaves along Fox Lake Road when stopping to take a break.

Now, off to Stony Creek to build some single track.

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Nupla PA375-LESG Pulaski Axe

Published April 19, 2012

Wednesday evening UPS delivered my new Pulaski, a tool combining an axe and an adz, and commonly used in wilderness firefighting and trail construction. I’ve been borrowing one for the past year or so but I wanted my own, so I looked around and ended up picking up this one, a Nupla PA375-LESG.

Made in the US and available from Amazon for ~$53 it seemed like a pretty reasonable purchase. I particularly like the ribbed handle which should make it feel a bit more solid when used with wet hands.

I also added this photo to the Wikipedia Pulaski article because it previously didn’t have a good photo of the tool’s head; just a man swinging the tool, with the head lost in shadows.

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Boulevard Connector?

Published April 19, 2012

While out riding to Lake Orion and back on Tuesday I noticed that the construction of the connector between the Paint Creek Trail and the Kern Road safety path (near the Clarkston / Kern / PCT intersection) is nearing completion and it appears that the base of it will split into a boulevard (with a median / central reservation).

If this is the case and the extra path isn’t just for construction access it’ll be nice. This is a notoriously blind corner and coming down this path towards the PCT currently requires some careful looking and neck craning to be sure one doesn’t ride out in front of someone else. Hopefully this’ll improve the sight lines and make for a better intersection.

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Blanding’s Turtle Rescue

Published April 14, 2012

While out riding at Stony Creek today, just before finishing up a segment of single track, I came around a corner and almost hit a turtle. It was walking along the middle of some grooved, dry, sunny sandy single track, and liable to get run over. When I passed it quickly pulled its head and legs in, so after quickly stopping I was able to easily moved it off the trail, but not before taking this picture of it. On my next pass through the turtle was nowhere to be seen, so hopefully it has made its way back to a more suitable piece of land.

It turns out that this is a Blanding’s Turtle, a Michigan Protected Species. According to MSU it is categorized as S3, or “rare or uncommon in state (on the order of 21 to 100 occurrences)”.

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Fallen Tornado Siren

Published April 1, 2012

While out on today’s ride I was finally able to get photos of the tornado siren on 22 Mile just east of M-53 which was knocked down after apparently being hit by a car. Per the decal inside of the Vortex Gear Drive Rotor this is made by Whelen Engineering, and after digging around a bit this appears to be part of Whelen’s Vortex series. I probably should have looked closer at the outside of the control box to see more specifically what it is.

This company was featured in an episode of How It’s Made about warning sires which can be viewed here on their site.

Seeing it laying at the side of the road for the past couple weeks it’s hard not to fantasize about picking up the siren and taking it home to play. Ignoring the illegality (and potential terrorism charges) related to this, there’s some serious practical concerns… Like, how exactly does one activate a tornado siren anywhere but the remotest parts of Michigan without attracting significant attention? After all, the literature I was finding online claims 129dB at 100 feet. Playing with this would be a bad, bad idea.

For some more photos of this fallen siren, click here. There is also a PDF listing all of Whelen’s Mass Notification products available here, and this is a series of tutorial videos showing how to use their online siren location planning software. Finally, this map lists all the warning siren locations in Macomb County. Apparently the place where Danielle and I live is technically just slightly outside of listed coverage areas.

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