The Trail Map – Part 1

May 14, 2026 | Cartography, QGIS

A few posts ago I babbled about cartography. I’ve never had the patience for Cartography mainly because two things usually happen…well three things:

  • the map can’t be bigger than 8×11
  • the map must have everything on it
  • Make the map however you want except we will change it at the last second.

A couple of years ago I did a map for a local park. They had a map. The person that did it quit or something. I took what data I could cobble together and updated it. The big problem was “It has to be flipped” with North pointing down. When you walked out of the visitors center you’re facing south but your brain looks at the map that faces north. Several people walked out of the Visitors center and immediately walked into surrounding neighborhoods and were lost.

So I have this map data – why not have fun with it. QGIS has a style manager. You can make a style and save it here and apply it to about whatever you want.

There is also the online Hub where you can share and download styles from the QGIS Community. So if I wanted to play a bit I may bounce this up to 11×17 AND why not explore styles. Klas Karlsson made a style that mimics Pen and Pencil…so I downloaded and imported the style AND….

Original:

Pen and Pencil:

I decided to fill in any polygons with hatching that was used Klas’s Pencil Style. I may go back and fix the parking lots as dots. This is all an experiment with no deadline on when I have to be done. Of course if I’m doing this in “pencil” I should pull all the color out of it and just do it in Black and White. Over all this has been fun. I have some other stuff I want to do with tree shading. Of course if I do trees then I need to show fields. If I do all of that maybe I label more things vs using symbols.

Part 2 will be coming shortly as this progresses. Prepare for me to set back cartography decades with my experimentation.

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