Trail Report 2025 & New Map Creation 11.3.2025

End of Season Trail Report 2025

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As the year winds down and the holiday season approaches, it’s important to ponder how fortunate we are to live in a paradise with so many who are more than just neighbors.  They are community champions supporting each other and Chinquapin. It’s hard to articulate the pride I have in the many volunteers contributing to make our community strong.

This is especially true of our awesome trail team.  They met a milestone this year (or should I say a 22-mile milestone) by reestablishing the old record left by the Carlton family. So many of our trails became roads for development that we lost half our trails.  Thanks to so many for stepping up and volunteering so we once again have 22 miles of Chinquapin trails!

2025 was our most ambitious year.  The following accomplishments were completed for all by the many who were able to willingly give of their time and labor to improve Chinquapin:

-Completion of the 3.25-mile Navy trail.  A two-year project connecting Roaming Road to the Laurel Ridge trail.  Features overlooks, streams and rock formations.

-Completion of two connecting trails between the Navy and Red trails.

-Redoing the ropes on the Rye Mt. trail.

-Extending the Rye Mt. Trail around Tulip Pond.

-Cutting brush on parts of the Rye Mt., Packs Creek, Gray, and Navy Trails.

-Mowing Packs Creek Trail in fairways.

- Removal of downed trees on the Red and Green trails.

-Change blazes for the redesignated Green-Rye Mt. Trails connector.

-New bridge on the Rye Mt. Trail.

-Repair of Tebow’s and Ian’s Bridges.

-Extending Packs Creek Trail past Zach’s Shoals near the Fish Shack.

-Completion of an up-to date trail system map.

-Planning for next summer.

          -Orange and Packs Creek Trails extensions.

          -new bridge and board walk on Rye Mt. trail.

          -Repair, Replace or Remove bridges on golf path.

If you’re interested in helping next year just look for posts on WhatsApp. All are welcome. To conclude, the year has been stupendous because of the people who made it so.  I look forward to an even better 2026.

On behalf of your Trail Committee, Dave Barnett

New Map Creation Process, by Kim Knapp

Thank you, Kim! This map is on the Maps & Trails page.

When Dave Barnett asked my wife Alison, an artist, to create a trailhead map to replace the original one that was posted long ago near Fish Shack before falling off its posts (now, temporarily in our garage), the job appeared to be one that my computers and expertise could execute.

I started by setting four goals:

1. Start with the current “Carlton 1-4” map created for us by The North American Land Trust.

2. Change the map from Satellite View to Terrain View so that the roads display better and, hopefully, make it easier to find the trails.

3. Create it in a very high resolution so that it looks good when printed at 48”H x 36”W to replace the original Trailhead map. I figured the standard, high resolution for photos would do: 240 pixels per inch (8640 pixels wide x 11,520 H for the Trailhead map).

4. Keep a master version of the complete map that has separate layers for each trail so they can be adjusted or deleted easily. This also allows us to print separate maps for individual trails, if we wish to do so (similar to taking the GPS data and adding it to Google My Maps).

   
   

For step 1, I simply loaded the current, Carlton map from the HOA website into Photoshop.

For steps 2 and 3, I went down to my racing simulator, which uses Windows and has three side-by-side 4K monitors set up so that a window can span all three, giving 11,520 pixels wide, more than enough for the width. I opened Google Maps, changed it to terrain mode and expanded it so that it showed the same portion of Chinquapin, width-wise across the three monitors, as the Carlton map. Since the height of the monitors is only 2160 pixels, I had to start by displaying the bottom of the map, doing a screen capture, moving the map down about 1600 pixels (needed overlap to be able to align them in Photoshop) and doing another screen capture, repeat several times.

Next, I loaded the horizontal strips of screen captures into Lightroom and lined them up to create one large, high resolution terrain map. Don’t try this unless you have lots of memory on your computer. I then moved it onto the Carlton map, creating a separate layer under the Carlton map. I lowered the opacity of the Carlton map so I could see the new map under it and resized the Carlton map to line up with the new map.

The next step was getting the trails onto the new map. On the Carlton map layer, I selected one trail at a time, using the Magic Wand Tool, and carefully expanded and adjusted the selection to get a good copy of the trail. I used the selection to create a “New Layer via Copy”. After a lot of time making sure the trail layers looked right and the trails that overlay each other (for example, the Interpretive Trail, Packs Creek Trail and Nature’s Walk Trail overlap near the Outpost) looked right when overlaid, I brought up the opacity of the Carlton Layer and made some modifications at the bottom of the map.

Unfortunately, Google Maps keeps road names the same, small size when blowing up the map, so I took some of them and made them larger, added the Outpost and Fish Shack, plus some other details.

Finally, I took some GPS data from fellow hikers and some that I created and fixed the Gray Trail and the Laurel “Pink” Trail. And I put in our Chinquapin Naturally logo and moved the North American Land Trust logo.