Bill Meldrum is working with Wakefield Ensemble and the Municipaliy of La Pêche to create high-quality hiking and snowshoe maps of the Wakefield area. He has LiDAR data from the NCC and 2014 orthophotos from the county office. Using the same base material, these maps will then evolve into orienteering and ROGAINE maps in the future. 

Last Thursday, Ken Bouchard and Stephen Ferguson from Wakefield Ensemble joined Bill M. and I to survey the existing snowshoe trails. Stephen was able to borrow a high-end GPS unit from his company, Sanders Geophysics, to generate an accurate track that we can use to draft the trails. He didn’t have the ability to take waypoints so he stopped at main intersections and large features for a few seconds to create “puddles” of GPS points. His unit was set to take a long/lat reading every half second.

It’s the first time that we have had the opportunity to work with a high-end GPS unit that is accurate to centimetres in the open areas. So it will be interesting to see how everything comes together.

Here we are hard at work gathering puddles of GPS points at one of the benches overlooking the Gatineau river.

Cheers,

Bill Anderson