About the Musquash

The Musquash is a 950+ acre conservation area in Londonderry, NH, which contains roughly 15 miles of trails. The central portion has several interconnected swamps with trails winding between them. The northern and southern portions, which have been purchased by the town in more recent years, are drier and have more hills.

There are now five primary trailheads into the Musquash: The end of Hickory Hill Drive, Sara Beth Lane, Faucher Road, Alexander Road, and the northernmost tip of Tanager Way. It is also possible to enter the Musquash from Watts Road via the power line access trails and from the Litchfield State Forest in Litchfield.

The Musquash in managed by the Town of Londonderry and overseen by the Conservation Comission. Trail maintenance is performed by Londonderry Trailways.

Official maps

John Vogl, the Londonderry town GIS manager, has worked with Londonderry Trailways to make a very nice trail map (PDF, 1.2MB). A new official map is currently in the works and should be available in early 2011. It will be based on my map data and will include additional trails, updated routes, and might even be slightly more accurate than the current map.

Photos

A few photos I've taken are shown on the map below.

Larger map

My mapping work

The objective of my work is to create an orienteering-quality map. That is, I hope to accurately map features such as stone walls, large boulders, ruins, or small knolls which are not found on typical trail maps.

The links below are merely quick snapshots of what I'm working on. They aren't intended to look like the final map, and may or may not be useful for navigation.

August 2010

I've uploaded my most recent trail data to www.openstreetmap.org. Just note that that conservation area boundary isn't correct, since the town has bought quite a few surrounding parcels since that boundary was drawn.
If you have a GPS or smartphone that supports WMS, you should be able to download the openstreetmap version of the map and use it as you walk around.

May 2010

Complete map (PDF, 668kB) - This map is just a trail map intended to look similar to the official map.

January 2010

Overview - covers most of the Musquash
Northern part
Southern part

Mapping tools

I have used quite a few programs to manipulate and translate the different data layers, all of which are free, and most of which are open-source.

• Quantum GIS - I do most of the work in QGIS, most of which consists of drawing map features based on GPS data or field drawings. I usually print off the map from QGIS, and then go into the woods and draw features on the map. When I come back, I draw them in QGIS, print off a new map, and repeat.
• GDAL/OGR - These libraries include tools (gdalwarp and ogr2ogr) which I have used to translate the coordinate systems of different layers. QGIS uses these under the hood to do on-the-fly coordinate projection.
• JOSM (Java OpenStreetMap) - Desktop editor for OpenStreetMap.
• G7toWin - My preferred free Windows tool for uploading and downloading data from my Garmin GPS.
• GPSBabel - My preferred tool for uploading and downloading data from my Garmin on Linux.

Sadly, my Garmin eTrex Vista died in 2008 from some power-related problem. I've replaced it with a Nokia N810, using its built-in GPS receiver and Maemo Mapper. I've also begun writing some programs for it: an odometer/speedometer/time gadget similar to the Garmin's data page, and a tool to capture several points over time and average them for a more accurate reading.