Spring is here and I am feeling ambitious about this year's
gardening and foraging. Those mushrooms should not stay in the
forest!
I am thinking of mapping the foraging on orienteering maps.
I've been stitching together a large map of the area. Actually I
started the map so that I could go kayaking around the area, but
it can double up as a foraging map.
It keeps surprising me how little information there is about
the local area. This is one of those blind spots that the reliance
on hugely scaled technology leaves behind. The information must
be somewhere of course, but it's not that easy to find. If my
country didn't have a publicly funded office that is responsible
for mapping, I wouldn't even have these orienteering maps in
easily accessible form. These old offices are not that good at
going online, so I am using someone's hobbyist mapping service
to access the public data, which in it's original design is not
very usable since it will not allow high resolution exports.
After I have the map with topological features, I fill in the
important services in the area. Things like, where are nature
reserves, where can you make a fire, where to find drinking
water, are there any sights. I think eventually I will have to
go to google maps and start browsing the images of the area,
just to see if I missed anything important. But for now, I am
browsing through the local businesses and organizations that
are into tours and such.
Of course the interesting part will come when I start paddling
around the area and seeing what's there. The waterways here have
a lot of historical depth to them, as they have been the main
way of transportation in the past times.
