Updates on Mapping back country hazards and the most objectively hazardous back country areas in Washington State.
A very early stage in my process, mapping cell phone coverage in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness via combination of crowd sourced data courtesy of Cairn™©, and data from the FCC on carrier provided data. Shown on top of a couple different trail data sets from the Washington State Recreation Conservation Office, and the National Forest Service.
Taking the crowd sourced data from Cairn, I merged the data with the FCC Data to fill in some of the gaps, or potential inaccuracy of the FCC data. Then using the eraser tool I erased any trails that happened to lie within 'coverage; - resulting in the red trails. By simply changing to color of the original trails layer, we can see that the green trails are theoretically where we should have cell phone service in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness/ Mt. Baker - Snoqualmie National Forest.
Roughly symbolized map of; deaths by avalanche, trails that intersect with known bear habitat (black), trails that intersect with known mountain goat territory (light gray, hard to see, sorry about that), trails that intersect with landslide areas (orange, very few and small areas luckily), trail segments with no cell phone service, (red, more than whats shown, other variables are on top), trails that are green have little or no hazardous variables that I've analyzed. The tan polygon is the Mt. Baker - Snoqualmie National Forest.
Trails with multiple hazards and factors of safety, averaged, and normalized by Z score. Cell phone service being a large weight due to the literature and field expert commentary I have reviewed. Points shown, are accidents in technical outdoor recreation (primarily climbing) mostly due to natural hazards despite preparation or precaution.