Other Recommended Web Sites

Other sites of interest

PAwaterfalls.com
Raymond Chippa is a very talented photographer and waterfall hunter from north eastern PA. His site has pictures of many waterfalls listed here and he often gets the "inside scoop" on new waterfall locations. If you're a waterfall fanatic, his site is a must-see.

Outstanding Scenic Geological Features of Pennsylvania
Randy Newcomer's web site features the first volume of this out-of-print book, originally published by the PA Geological Survey. One of my goals is to geo-code the locations in these two volumes, but that will take some time. Any volunteers?

Covered Bridges in PA
Dale Travis hosts a site dedicated to covered bridges, round barns, and other interesting places. He was even thoughtful enough to provide coordinates for each. If covered bridges are your thing, you'll want to check his site out. The linked page is to the Pennsylvania covered bridges list, but you can get to his home page here.

Geocaching.com
The largest geocache listing service on the Internet, and where I got started with the hobby.

Navicache.com
Another geocache listing site, one with fewer rules and fewer caches than Geocaching.com.

Pennsylvania State Game Lands Maps
Game lands are found throughout the state and hold many lost treasures, in the form of ghost towns, abandoned structures, old mines, hiking trails, etc. You can find maps of these lands at the Game Commission web site.

Pennsylvania State Park Maps
The Department of Conservation and Natural Resources maintains maps for all PA State parks. They can be downloaded from this site.

Pennsylvania State Forest Maps
The DCNR Bureau of Forestry maintains maps for all PA State Forests, and you'll find them here. All overlooks shown on these maps have been geo-coded and appear in our Overlooks database.

Pennsylvania Spatial Data Access
All sorts of GIS information for Pennsylvania and some tutorials on how to use it.

Keystone Trails Association
The organization that promotes hiking and maintains hiking trails throughout Pennsylvania.

Software Applications Used for Geo-coding

Much of this project involves geo-coding, or the process of determining an exact set of coordinates for a location based on descriptive directions, maps, or other information sources. Geo-coding is a time consuming and error-prone process, but these applications make it much easier.

Google Earth
This application is free to download and use, but it's extremely valuable for this project. It renders the entire earth in 3D, and lets you view aerial photos with roads overlaid.

USA Photo Maps
This excellent freeware program by Doug Cox uses Terraserver to download and display aerial photos and USGS topographical maps. It's easy to change between the aerial photo view and the topo map view to find an exact location.

GSAK - The Geocaching Swiss Army Knife
This unique program is a database custom designed for manipulating location information. It allows searching, sorting, and viewing records based on their locations, or their locations in relation to other records. A powerful macro language makes it easy to automate repetitive tasks or to generate HTML. In fact, the lists of waypoints used on this web site are created with GSAK and a custom macro I wrote just for that purpose. GSAK is shareware, with a nag-free 21 day trial period. After that it remains fully functional, but displays a nag screen on startup. Registration is $25.

Garmin MapSource City Navigator & Topo USA 2008
This software is really designed for owners of Garmin GPS units, however it's quite useful for geo-coding purposes as well. Roads and streets are easily searched with City Navigator, and when Topo USA is thrown into the mix you can immediately see all the streams and topography to help pinpoint locations. I often use MapSource to get close to a location, then try to use USA PhotoMaps or Google earth to zoom in to the exact location. Because MapSource City Navigator costs about $115, and Topo USA 2008 is another $60 on top of that, this is really only recommended for Garmin owners who can take full advantage of the program.