30 Day Map Challenge Day 1, Points: Mapping New Mexico Peaks (Shallow Thoughts)

30 Day Map Challenge Day 1, Points: Mapping New Mexico Peaks

November is the 30 Day Map Challenge.

Like last year, I'm going to work it sporadically, since I've been busy with a bunch of other things. But this sort of challenge can be a great way to motivate myself to learn new technologies or get better acquainted with old ones, so it's fun to work the challenges when I have time.

Day 1 is Points, and I'm mapping peaks in New Mexico.

Something that comes up a lot on hikes is the question "What's that peak over there?" There are apps, like PeakFinder, but even if you don't mind paying for them (they aren't terribly expensive), I find they don't work as well as I'd hoped (at least on Android; an iPhone friend has a peak finding app that seems to work better). And mapping apps, like OsmAnd, don't label features reliably, at least when you're zoomed out; you often need to zoom way in to get the name of a peak (if it has it at all), by which time the map area is so narrow that you can't compare it to what else you're seeing around you.

But OsmAnd, at least, makes it easy to display a GPX file. So if I could make a GPX file with names of peaks, I could display it in OsmAnd at any scale and it would show where the named peaks were as waypoints, and I could tap on a waypoint and get the name and height of each peak.

The first step is to get a list of peaks. Initially I made my list from a nice clear list on SummitPost.org and I've been using that for years.

I was hoping today to re-do the list using something more official, like USGS's GNIS (Geographic Names Information System) — but every year or so I spend the better part of a day searching and clicking around USGS.gov and various search engines, looking for a way to download GNIS data for summits, with elevations, and I always strike out (today was no different).

So here are the GPX files I made from the SummitPost list: nmpeaks.gpx • jemez-peaks.gpx • sangre-peaks.gpx • taos-peaks.gpx .

And curiously, I find I also have one more file: nm-mountains.gpx which seems to have been made from an old GNIS database, back when you could actually download that data. Sorry, though, I only have New Mexico; I don't have a nationwide data file.

If I ever succeed in downloading peak data from the USGS or some other official source, I'll update this article.