Frick Park Mapping

I'm am very lucky to live near to what is, for my money, the best urban park in the country. At nearly 100 years old and over 600 acres, Pittsburgh's Frick Park has a wide range of biomes, terrain, and amenities, and is the best and closest "wilderness" experience within city limits. While it features lots of wide gravel paths, Frick Park is also interspersed with dozens of serpentine backwoods trails designed for mountain biking. These excellent but poorly-marked trails create a web of inscrutable yet navigable pathways connecting every part of the park.

For over two years, I explored these trails, discovering how they interlinked, looped back on themselves, and tied the various parts of the park together. I was filled with the ambition to hike every trail in the park in a day, but as I kept discovering more and more trails, I eventually settled on limiting my hike to 37 miles So, on my 37th birthdayI began a grueling and joyful marathon where I knitted together the disparate trails I'd spent time mapping into a singular 15-hour hike, with almost no backtracking. 

Not really art, but a major achievement and one that I'm very proud of. Perhaps someday I'll use the GPS data to help develop a more comprehensive map of this excellent park.