Bivouac.com Information

Welcome to the Canadian Mountain Encyclopedia. It is the largest guidebook in Canada. It was started in 1995 and growing continuously since then. The guidebook is structured, with pages on each mountain, backroad, trail and feature. Every item is geo-referenced such that it can be displayed on a built in mapping system. It has 30,000 mountains, 4000 backroads, 3000 trails. Attached to the basic infrastructure items, Bivouac has 10,000 feature photos, 2700 trip reports and 6900 road/trail bulletins. It also has about 400 articles such as equipment reviews. Each "page" has a link at the top called "GMap". It launches a Google based mapping system. Whatever page you start GMap from, the map information will be centered around that point. Beside every GMap link is a red question mark ? which leads to a Introductory GMap Tutorial . There is a lot you can do with GMap, so you'll probably want to read the tutorial at some point. But here's a summary. GMap displays a "base map" such as the familiar Canadian 1:50,000 maps we all used for decades. On top of this "base map", GMap overlays the road, trail and mountain information from the database. It only overlays everything within 20 km. You can then pan the map and see everything within your area of interest. This allows you to investigate the condition of various roads without knowing the name of the road. Gpx Export: As you know, a .gpx file is a file which you can load into your GPS. A Gpx file can contain a whole set of mountains, roads, trails and features like cabins. To make these .gpx files, there are various links. Every trip page has a link to download a trck log for that trip. Every mountain page has a link to make a gpx file containing all mountains, roads and trails within 20 km. What is most useful? Depends on who you talk to. Like any large system, most users only discover a subset of the full capabilities. I know that because when I add a new and important link such as GMap, 6 months later I find out only a minority of users have discovered it. Some ...