cougar mountain hiking and google map fun

We set a family goal to hike all of the trails of Cougar Mountain in 2019.  After another good hike yesterday (about 5 miles since we wanted to go down a couple missed spur trails for efficiency's sake), here are our completed trails:

Ok, we have quite a lot still to do in the last two months of the year, but it will be fun to see how far we get.  We got D motivated to finish yesterday with promises of a night hike with flashlights to come... pretty easy since with daylight savings time over, darkness will be coming early.

In addition to plotting out a big map of the park we can mark up at home, I am having fun curating a google map of the hikes, complete with the color auto-gradient above, based on date.  This also lets me do fun things like export the lines into google earth to get the 3D view.

Custom google maps have become my go-to trip planning tool, as well.  For our Azores trip, I found hike GPS files and pulled them into a map of Sao Miguel, giving us lots of options depending on what we felt we could handle, and the weather, on any given day.

Conversely, our trip to Scotland was planned down to exactly the bus stop and routes we would use in a google map (Cari had a spreadsheet, too, but I say ppppppbbbbfff to spreadsheets).  Adults only, and we were prepared for weather :)

Even for the Azores, it was pretty easy to find path files on the internet to load into the map.  For Scotland (and Washtington state- WTA maintains a database), it is very easy and fun (for me, clearly).