The Map
My Walk in the Woods
On Monday it was a chilly but quite lovely morning in Maine. I took a walk up the hill behind my house. After a mile hike I reached the summit of Pease Hill and took a picture of the fall foliage looking west towards Mount Washington. My Android phone takes a pretty good picture and automatically stitches together side-by-side pics into a panorama which I can then post to social media, if I want.
The Map
Later in the day I wanted to look at a map of my walk and get a feel for the topography of the area I had traversed. After a search online I remembered that Map Business Online has topographic maps included with the map program. This is a nice additional feature for a business mapping software – especially if you have workers in the field managing assets or collecting data.
I was able to easily place key points on the map that described the beginning and end of my walk. At each point I included a location name and a web link to a picture of the location. One was a Google Street view and the other was a picture I’d posted on Facebook.
I was also able to choose a topographic layer as a base map – the choices in MapBusinessOnline.com are topographic, National Geographic or aerial imagery. We source these data layers from www.esri.com. I chose the topographic layer which is essentially a stitched composite of the USGS Quad maps.
A distance tool is also available which helped me determine exactly how far I had walked. I think a two-mile walk, half of it uphill, is pretty good for me in the morning; especially on nice days.
Using the Map Draw tools included within Map Business Online I quickly traced the path I’d taken. Once the aerial imagery was turned on I could pull adjustment points on the draw line to perfectly align my walk with the actual roads and paths traveled.
The Bear
I often pick up trash on the road as I walk. I suppose I could catalog my collection efforts when I get home and import and map Excel data of the items collected. But maybe that’s going overboard? Maybe I’ll just pay attention to where I walk for a while and focus on avoiding the ‘rabid’ fox and any stray black bears coming down off the mountain for forage. I’ve seen the fox once and as for the bear, as they say around here, “I seen bear sign. There was bear scat up off-in that hill.”
One extra benefit of most business mapping applications is that it can be applied to your personal life as well as your business challenges. Sure you can use it as a customer mapping software, a sales territory mapping software, or just to compare competitors but just the same the tool can be used for fun.
Because I saved my map view, in the future I can add to it as I explore more territory around the house. We live next to the largest undeveloped section of land in York County Maine. Much of it managed by a land preserving non-profit – http://www.fsht.org. There’s a lot to explore and discover, with many beautiful outcrops that overlook the surrounding area. And I can even create a shared web map of my map to share with other hikers. I’ve included an Map Business Online Map Link above where you can see the walk, pictures, and see the linked web pages.
The Dead Body
Cornish, Maine is a magical community. Just look at the way we rise to the Halloween occasion around here: Dead Body Link. Since first publishing this blog the body count has grown 800%. Yikes! Cue the poltergeist. I’ll be curtailing my after dark walks for the foreseeable future.
Happy Halloween everybody.
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