Help me make and print a map route (difficulty level: rivers not roads)

May 2, 2020 4:49 PM

Hi! Many years ago my father canoed across Canada retracing old fur trade routes. I'd like to make a map of the route he took, and have it printed and framed for him. How do I do this?

-- I think as a starting point I need a website or service that will provide me with a base map, let me add my father's route onto it, and then export the result. My goal is literally a single line tracing the route, over top of a map.

-- I don't think the base map itself matters much? As long as it shows waterways (and their names are labeled), it should work for my purposes.

-- I would really love it if this was simple & easy to do! And I am willing to pay if that helps! But I'm also willing to put energy into it myself if I need to, e.g. downloading and learning new software, or tediously looking up map points in Google Maps and then typing their latitude & longitude into some other site.

-- I'm assuming that getting the map printed and framed will be the easy part, but if you have a company you've used and liked, I would love to know about it.

-- I know that if all else fails I can just buy a map and draw on it with a marker, and if I have to, I will. But I'd like to do this whole thing electronically if I can, because of the pandemic. (I don't want to need to go to the post office to mail a physical object to a framing company.)

If I'm missing anything obvious here or making any weird assumptions, please tell me. And thanks for your help!

posted by Susan PG to Computers & Internet (8 answers total)

There is probably a way to do this with MapBox or some other OpenStreetMap tool, assuming the waterways in question have been mapped. This being generating the image you'd then get printed and framed through some web service.
posted by wierdo at 4:52 PM on May 2, 2020 [1 favorite]

Mapbox can definitely help you start with a basemap and layer some simple additional data on top. To trace the route, try the free tool GeoJSON.io by MeFi’s-own tmcw and import that data to Mapbox.

Another option might be to find an existing PDF or raster map of Canada like these reference maps whose aesthetics you like, import it to the free QGIS as a background, and use the same GeoJSON traced route as an overlay.
posted by migurski at 5:42 PM on May 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

Gaia GPS can do this. They have a number of different base maps that you can start with (some free, some paid). It would just be a matter of finding one you like (Canada may have fewer free options by the look of things). Creating a route, either by clicking points or searching coordinates, is very simple. Printing or exporting anything other than the base topographic map requires the paid version ($17 for the year) but you could still try it out for free and see if it does what you are looking for.

It has options for uploading and downloading routes as well though if you just wanted to use it to build the route and then uploading elsewhere to overlay a different map.
posted by Medw at 7:38 PM on May 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

Most web maps like Google are really bad about labeling rivers. It's just not their thing--people get around on roads, so that is what is labelled. To get good river labels in the US, I would use USGS Topographic maps as my base map. I'd look for the Canadian equivalent of that. Consider your scale. Small stream may be labelled on a 1:24,000 map, but not a 1:100,000 map. Think about what geographical area you want to cover, how big you want to print this, and therefore what your scale is. It may be necessary to mosaic together many 1:24k maps to get the resolution you're looking for. If you have access to a GIS, there are plenty of web services that can do this automatically, but you can also just download the graphics of the topo maps, crop off the collars, and manually edit them together, then draw in the route in a new layer of a graphics program.
posted by agentofselection at 8:31 PM on May 2, 2020

Google Earth would work. You probably don't have to worry too much about small streams that wouldn't appear there because IIRC the assorted cross Canada routes are mostly pretty substantial water ways (unless your father made side trips and you are wanting to show those).

What is the resolution of your source data? IE: do you only have a list of rivers traversed and stopping points or do you have regular lat/long points detailing the route?

Be aware that there are places where canoe routes have been physically altered depending on when years ago was and a modern map may not display the route taken if extreme accuracy is desired. EG: Kinbasket lake was formed by Mica dam at Big Bend. There is a lot more water in that region than there was in 1960.

Even on an A1 sheet a map of Canada is going to have a pretty small scale. So the exact routing of a river is completely consumed by the width of the line that represents the route. IE: a 1/8th" wide line on a 1:1,000,000 scale map represents a feature 3 kilometers wide on the map.
posted by Mitheral at 12:47 AM on May 3, 2020

While Canada's basemap can be very ropey (we're huge, sparsely populated, and far too much of our geography was mapped decades ago with no updates economically viable), if you can put a canoe in it, then it's navigable and DFO cares very much about it.

Mapbox gives you a nice front-end to work from, but in the back (and especially in Canada) it's all OSM data. Most of the Federal waterway data is in there, though not bathymetry because the agency that handles that doesn't believe in open data.

What format is the travel diary in? If it's dates and river/portage names, it's just a small matter of tracing the route. You could do all this in QGIS, but it's got a learning curve.

I know a couple of OpenStreetMappers in Canada who do maps as a side gig. I've done 'em too, but my map quality isn't as good as theirs. Ping me and I can put you in touch, and/or review what you've got.
posted by scruss at 5:37 AM on May 3, 2020

Response by poster: Ah this is all super-helpful: thank you :)

I've futzed around a little now with Gaia GPS and Google Earth and they seem to work similarly for my purposes, and to be fairly user-friendly. The travel diary is just text -- literally, like "From the bay at Fleury Point we headed for the Kisis Channel connecting Peter Pond lake and Buffalo Narrows." So this is fiddly work that means I need to cross-check different maps and sometimes make some guesses.. but I think it is doable.

Thank you everybody for your suggestions: I'm gonna mess around with all the options for a while, until I figure out what'll work best.
posted by Susan PG at 8:41 AM on May 3, 2020

Maperitive is the tool you need. Free download for PC. Define what map data looks like, save it as an svg and then laser cut it into nice wood. Used to do this for a bunch of customers in the Before Time.
posted by my-username at 9:47 AM on May 9, 2020