The Continental Divide Trail
In the summer of 2024, I started a ~3000 mile long journey on the Continental Divide Trail down the Rocky Mountains. I started in Montana at the Canadian border and walked south for the next 5 months. Along the way I took pictures, wrote in my journal, sent messages to loved ones with the use of a satellite communicator and saved the locations of my campsites. This page is my process of combining all those parts of my trip into one data visualization.
If something seems buggy/unusable, it probably is! This is still very much a work in progress, and something I'm playing around with in my spare time.
GPS Device
I carried a Garmin Inreach Mini 2 on my trip in case of emergencies but also to keep loved ones at home updated on my progress (and to assure them I was still having fun). After my trip was over, I exorted my data from Garmin's website and wrote a script to extract the subset of data I wanted to map, including date, time, lat, long, and message content. I then mapped these in the data vis.
Every night on the trail, I also sent a preset message along the lines of "camped here for the night!" I was able to filter these messages out and mapped those with a different symbol in the data visualization.
Photos
I used Exif to extract location data from my photos, similar to the data I extracted from my GPS device. I then mapped these photos in the data visualization, using the date and time of the photo to determine which day it was taken on. Using the each photo's mappe
CalTopo
I did not use my GPS device to track my daily mileage as this would run through the devices battery. Instead, after the trail I used CalTopo to track the course of my progress each day based on the locations of my campsites. I then exported these tracks as GeoJSON and uploaded them to the data vis, alternating the colors to distinguish between individual days.
Thanks for visiting!
Wanna Get in Touch? Want to talk about the trail? Gear? Code? A job? :D Shoot me an email at katy6514 [at] gmail [dot] com. I'd love to hear from you!
