Independent Study
Geography 499

Park Mapping with GPS: Mount Douglas Park Trails

Brianne Ranta

Summer 2008
View from the Summit of Mount Douglas, looking out across Haro Straight (left), at the summit (center), and the city of Victoria (right)

Introduction

This study was conducted in Victoria, British Columbia ’s,Mount Douglas Park in early May 2008. This park is located in the municipality Saanich and is the largest park within the region. Mount Doug is approximately 182 ha and is 213 m in elevation at its summit.This park is an important tourism feature for the city of Victoria, as it is close to the University of Victoriaand to downtown.When reaching its summit one can enjoy 3600 views of the city, the Olympic mountains and Cascade mountains, as well as, looking down on Cordova Bay and Haro Straight.The park has numerous trails, a paved road to the summit, and beach access. Within the park there is also a small stream called Douglas creek which supports Pacific Salmon.
Various trails within Mount Douglas Park.

Methods

This park has always been very important to me. Living a few blocks away, my dog Shadow and I have grown up using the network of trails. For this project a Garmin GPS (global positioning system) unit was used to collect data on the trail systems in the park. This data was then downloaded into ArcMap.  A 2007 colour aerial photograph was captured from mapplace ( http://www.mapplace.ca ) to be draped over a digital elevation model to produce a 3D image.

Results

Figure 1: Final map output for Mount Douglas Park trail network.

Figure 2: A 3D image of Mt.Douglas trails.  Trails are shown in yellow.

Conclusions

Without the assistance of Shadow this project would not have occurred.Thanks to Roger for supporting me, lending me a GPS unit, and for allowing me to do this project. Some horizontal errors occur in 3D imaging due to vertical exaggeration required to project the entire trail network.
Shadow using various trails within the park.

References

An alternate trail map can be found at:http://www.saanich.ca/resident/parks/pdfs/mountdoug.pdf

A map of the park without trails, as well as the image used in the drape, can be found on the mapplace website at: http://www.mapplace.ca using the ‘Saanich online mapping system’.

Photos taken by Brianne Ranta.

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