A few years ago, I hiked the entire Muddy Branch trail. But when people asked me about this wonderful amenity, I struggled to explain where it was and how to access it.
Then I met Stephanie. Stephanie is a cartographer. She’s based on the other side of the country, in Seattle. But that didn’t matter for what we wanted to do together.
I showed Stephanie the existing maps of the Muddy Branch trail and the watershed. I described the problem. I asked whether she could help me make something better.
She said yes.
We agreed that our key objectives for the project were to create better maps of the trail, update narratives about the trail that were floating around in places other than the Alliance’s own website, and help other people do similar projects.
We started with the map itself, using a platform called OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is exactly what it sounds like… sort of. It is a map, and it is open, in the sense that anyone can edit and use the data. But it is about much more than streets. The goal of OpenStreetMap is to map everything that physically exists in the world. The Muddy Branch trail and its associated amenities physically exist, so they should be on the map.
To be able to accurately represent our trail on the map, I went out to re-hike segments of it. I observed features of the trail, like which segments were paved, where parking was available, and whether the parkland belonged to Montgomery County or City of Gaithersburg. Then I added that information to OpenStreetMap, using a feature called “tags.”
From the updated information in OpenStreetMap, Stephanie created the map that you can now see on our Trails page.
That map isn’t just a static image – it changes as information is updated in OpenStreetMap. That’s why it’s important that we, the Muddy Branch Alliance, continue to make sure the information in OpenStreetMap is accurate! The same way that we are responsible for the actual trail out there in the world, we are responsible for the information about the trail in OpenStreetMap. No one else is going to do it.
And on the subject of being responsible for accurate information about our trail – the second goal of the mapping project was to update narratives of the trail that exist in places other than our own website. It turns out there was a lot of misinformation about our trail floating around the internet. Stephanie and I discovered that the County Parks website was describing the segment of our trail that is on County Park land, and they were implying that that segment was the entire trail. Then, websites like Tripadvisor and Alltrails were picking up that information and re-sharing it, represented as a description of the entire trail.
We are working with County Parks to update the description on their website. Once that is done, we hope that more accurate information will propagate across the internet, to all the other websites that are mentioning our trail.
One website that mentions our trail is Wikipedia. We were able to fix that ourselves. So now that is a source of correct information, and we hope that might propagate as well.
After updating our own maps and related information about our trail, our third goal was to help other people do similar projects. This blog post is part of that effort! Please share it.
Having worked with Stephanie to complete an accurate geographic map that shows where the trail is and how you can access it, I also wanted a map that expresses why our watershed is worth exploring! Many years ago, a high school student had created an artistic map depicting points of interest around the Muddy Branch stream. But, that map had become outdated as the community continued to change. So, I asked a local professional artist to design a new version of that map. This is what Lea Craigie created:
This map shows the watershed of the Muddy Branch stream and the many interesting places in the surrounding area. Learn more about places to visit around the Muddy Branch.
Our watershed is beautiful – get out and explore it!