A provincial trail map project came to Jasper on Monday (Jan. 18) with a draft of a northern Rockies recreational trails map open for the public’s feedback.
A project spearheaded by Alberta TrailNet and Alberta Tourism, Parks and Recreation is preparing to release the first of 16 trail maps of Alberta, but not before it gets more input from local trail users.

The Northern Rockies Trail Map steering committee conducted community open houses on Monday at the Jasper Activity Centre, as well as in Grande Cache and Nordegg later in the week.

“We recognize that people travel around a bit to access different activities. So the real focus for these public open houses is first of all to let them see what we’ve been working on, because we’ve been out there collecting information and consulting with folks for a while now. And to give them an opportunity to take a look at it and provide input in terms of identifying if there’s some particular information that we may have missed that may be eligible to go on the map,” said Linda Strong-Watson, director of the Alberta TrailNet Society.

Once the new database is up and running, trail users can plan a trip and go on a website to download specific trail maps and read more detailed information about them that might not fit on the printed version.

The maps will include trail-surfacing information, how challenging a particular trail might be in terms of altitude gain, and historical and tourism knowledge that is adjacent to the trails.

The Northern Rockies region trail map will reach through Jasper, covering areas to Grande Cache in the north, White Goat Wilderness Area in the south and to Highway 40 in the east.

Strong-Watson said there is no way they could have reached everybody and that there is always a chance they’ve missed someone who has specific information that would be good to include in the map.

The Northern Rockies map was one of three maps displayed at the Activity Centre, and also the one that is more advanced than the others.

Alberta TrailNet divided the province into 16 regions, which Strong-Watson said could still change, but that is the number of maps that they anticipate will be necessary in order to cover the whole province.

“It’s an enormous project obviously because we have a big province and with these maps, we’re having to do field work to collect data and GIS. We are collecting a lot of information actually on the trails, it’s not just line data for where the trail is. One of our intentions is to ultimately have a provincial trails database,” Strong-Watson said.

The map is expected to be available this spring.