NEW: 9 Boulder City Nevada Trails

Ten new trails have been added to the Great Basin SUV Trails: Southern Nevada master map. Nine out of Boulder City and one out of Las Vegas. Most can be ridden by ATVs and Jeeps as well.    [For a free Google Earth file of this route see: http://offroadinghome.djmed.net/]

Despite the heat, Mike has been out in the field again verifying all the Lake Mead routes – tough work, but somebodies got to do it! One trail in the cool(er) mountains out of Vegas is a bit bumpy, but man what a view! Not a long ride but any chance to get off the pavement – it's all good.

The others all lead to water – and who can argue with that? I've given Mike's descriptions below so you can get a feel for what the routes are like. If you have ridden the area or are planning on going, please leave a comment about the trail.

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Utah Trails Master Map - Complete Re-Do

The Utah Trails ATV-SUV master map has undergone almost a complete revision and update.

The graphic interface for the whole file was enhanced, the entire Central Region was re-done almost from scratch and several new trails have been added which complete loops and from submitted trails.

A frequent trail submitter Michael Davidson added four trails near Beaver in Central Utah following a recent trip to the state: Forest Service roads 129, 137 and 147. They all go through beautiful country and to inspiring views. [For a free Google Earth file of this route see: Utah ATV-SUV Trails]

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Summer ATV UTV Jamborees

The "Tri-State," "Outlaw," "Paiute Trail" and "Manti Mountain" ATV Jamborees are done for the year – the Paiute and Manti concluded this very weekend. That still leaves FOUR MORE to go however, for those of you die-hards who either can't ever get enough or those who just haven't been able to break free yet.

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Dry Fork Canyon Petroglyphs

If you ever find yourself in Vernal Utah, either as a passage home or going to see the dinosaurs, you've got more to see than fossils. And, no, I don't mean the city wide floral arrangement that is their main street.

There be PETROGLYPHS!

And they're not all that hidden or hard to find and they don't need ATVs or SUVs to get to them. Just about every motel will have a brochure rack of pamphlets and they all have many about different "day-trips" you can take while staying in Vernal – a great idea!

The one about the petroglyphs in Dry Fork Canyon, Utah, USA [N 40.545761, W 109.637028] immediately caught my eye, as it where, and I coerced my party to stop and see them the next morning on our way home.

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GPS Maps 106: Reading A Topo Map

[This post is part six in a multi-part series about understanding the GPS system and its coordinate grid.

The last (hopefully) in the series of posts about maps: how they're made and how to use them, I wanted to do something quite difficult (on this end) and that I hadn't tried before. Well… you saw what happened on the last post.

As it turned out, the "dummy down" policy of Google Earth [which supports their "paid version"] prevented anyone who didn't have a fairly new graphics card from viewing the presentation.

Therefore, lets attempt to do in writing that which I thought would be much easier in demostration; so, break out that copy of an actual topo map that you have in the glove box and follow along.

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GPS Maps 106: How To Read A Topo Map

[This post is part six in a multi-part series about understanding the GPS system and its coordinate grid.

Being (hopefully) pretty much the last post in this series about reading topo maps, what we are going to discuss today is really "rubber on the road" stuff and, in large part builds upon what we've already discussed as well as using a slightly different technique than we've ever used in the past.

This is where we actually hold that piece of crumpled, soiled, many-times-folded paper in our hands and try to find "where the blazes are we?" … No kidding — go get your topo map. It's better if you actually have something to look at. I'll wait.

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NEW: Willow Springs - Griffith Peak - West End Wash

Despite the heat, or perhaps because of it, a patron of Offroading Home has been taking his Jeep into the desert on trails listed in our maps as well as new ones in the area.

I'm sure riding in an air-conditioned cab has at least something to do with it; but as we've seen in previous posts there are other advantages to riding in this "alternate" season.

Michael Davidson has been helping verify, and add to, the Great Basin SUV Trails: Southern Nevada map and sending in his GPS tracks so we can remove the hand-drawn lines and replace them with actual, honest-to-goodness ride coordinates.

The Willow Springs Road trail is a great get-away from the heat haze in Vegas. The Mount Charleston area is just a hop-skip-and-jump west down Kyle Canyon Road (NV-157).

He lists two trails: one, to the Griffith Peak trailhead and the other an accompanying hike up to Griffith Peak, which is where the photo accompanying this post comes from.

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GEO-tography: Bokeh

To continue a series of geologically related images taken by superb photographers and displayed on the "net," I thought that today we would highlight an old classic – but recently very much in vogue – technique: Bokeh.

It's a nouveau term for basically using narrow depth of field to control the area of interest. Unlike most photographic techniques, this one has a tendency to call attention to itself in any photograph.

The "ladybug" on Ladybug Rock in Cottonwood Wash down Gold Butte is the center of focus; but, the slightly out-of-focus massive rose quartz rock is still "highly present" in your mind and vision.

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ATV-SUV Trails Near Canyonlands

I think I've told you before about Dennis, a friend of Offroading Home who helped find us a new home when ATT went out of the web business.

Well, he's been putting together a map of one of the most picturesque riding areas in Southern Utah – Canyonlands.   [For a free Google Earth file of this route see: Hamburger Rock Trails]

It all started with a ride known as "trail 25" at Hamburger Rock and grew from there – as they say, "the rest is history."

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On The Butte With 'Desert Walker': A Gold Butte Summer

One of the advantages of posting a blog such as Offroading Home is the opportunity to meet some interesting 'characters.' I was at Kurt's Grotto just after the "fiends of Gold Butte" and BLM idiocy which closed it off, and struck up a conversation with two riders who looked like they knew what they were doing.

When I started to tell them about the maps available on the blog, they already knew all about it and showed me that they had been using them a lot. Since then the two, who use the moniker of 'Desert Walker,' have assisted in verifying tracks and waypoints and every so often send a photo of something they've seen.

When I began receiving photos of the Gold Butte rides they were taking in the middle of the summer, and heard about the 'unique' modifications they've made to their rigs, I then knew that they were indeed characters so decided to 'interview' them via Email, which went pretty much like this:

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Summer ATV-UTV Gatherings

For the most part, Offroaders are a bit of a solitary lot. I mean that we tend to seek out experiences with much smaller groups. However, at least once a year being part of the riding "community" is good for the soul.

It's a great time to experience an unfamiliar riding area with others who are more familiar with the trails. AND, these gatherings often have exhibitors with "free" samples! Not to mention new gadgets and equipment.

There are many of these events this summer – read on to see a substantial list.

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Map Update: Great Basin ATV-SUV Trails, South

I'm basking in the light of some help with trail verification here on the Offroading Home blog.

Michael Davidson, who usually rides in southern Nevada near Las Vegas has been following several of the Great Basin ATV-SUV trails and sending in his GPS tracks to verify the trails that I had to hand-draw from the Mitchell book.   [For a free Google Earth file of this route see: Great Basin ATV-SUV Trails, Southern]

The tracks are almost spot-on, with the exception of a couple of areas where he took an alternate route around a rock or some such.

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GPS Maps 105: Northing, Easting and Mercators Oh My

[This post is part five in a multi-part series about understanding the GPS system and its coordinate grid.]

Believe it or not both of these maps at the top of the post are REAL projections of the world map. I would hate to have to use them to ride offroad on my ATV but real projections none the less – just not the kind we're going to talk about today. In dutiful compliance with readers who have so far chided me for "ignoring" the UTM Coordinate system, this post is all about it.

However, I must confess that I sort of feel like a "lamb going to the slaughter" because I don't promise that after we are through you will understand it any better than you do now. I know that I don't think I do, and I've been studying the stuff almost non-stop for five months.

If you thought the last post about spheroids and datums was tough – hang on, this may be a bumpy ride! You almost need to forget everything we've talked about so far (except that the earth is not round) because it's all different as we will soon see. And the bass-ackward differences couldn't be anything except deliberate.

Your best bet during this discussion would be to keep reminding yourself that this UTM stuff was invented back when most of our worlds were what we could display on one map – and did not need to be concerned about the 'big picture.'

Just keep your mind focused that you are trying to merely solve the problem of looking at YOUR journey in YOUR corner of the world, draw it on a paper making it "look like" the ground that YOU were on, be able to easily visualize and calculate YOUR distances and YOU don't even know that there are "THEMS"… much less that there is an Australia.

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GEO-tography: Offroad Backlit

It's becoming a bit of a regular feature but photos gleaned from those published on the internet of places we've been, or want to be, draw no small amount of email.

Perhaps we just like to get ideas to help our own photography.

At any rate, this set of photos follow the "back-lit" theme and remind us that the sun doesn't always have to be over our shoulders and shining in our subjects squinty-eyed faces.

Once in awhile we can let it "back-light" our subject, even though we may need to use something white to reflect a little onto it's front.

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More On Faulty Google Earth Update 5.2

Version 5.2 does NOT correctly create zipped files (at least if they have network links in them) and there is no record of this bug on the users forum yet. The last time it took nearly 9 months to fix, so don't hold your breath.

If you have already "updated" to the 5.2 version you can easily roll back to the version 5.1 at: Google Earth Advanced Download. You will need to un-install 5.2 before you do this.

In addition I have now restored the correct Nevada and Arizona USGS waypoint files.