The powers-that-be from Mountain Trails Foundation, Snyderville Basin Recreation and Park City Municipal sat down and decided they wanted to make the annual Summer Trail Map more simple and engaging.
The 2011 Summer Trail Map, to be released today, has a number of new features for the plethora of trails stretching from the basin out toward Park City.
Charlie Sturgis, executive director of Mountain Trails, said with every new year comes more tinkering. New developments, trails and reroutes lead to revisions, and with that comes more work for the following year’s map.
This year, the group decided to try to make the map more user friendly.
“The trail system is pretty complex,” Sturgis said. “When you put it on a map, it’s pretty difficult to read at times. We identified a number of high-use areas or difficult-to-navigate areas and, with that, we decided that those were the areas that we wanted to highlight on the map.”
Sturgis said on one side of this year’s map, roughly one-third will be dedicated to trails from Summit Park to Guardsman Pass.
He said there will be an overview of that area with trails in various colors. There will be neighboring matching color-coded insets that magnify details in certain areas along those trails on the map.
Sturgis also said on back of this year’s map there will be a section dedicated to the area ranging from McPolin Barn to Guardsman Pass.
“This being all the old hand-built trails,” he said. “Showing the easiest way up Mid-Mountain and up the ridge. The big thing is, all these small trails tucked in between Deer Valley and Park City will be highlighted and way easier to read.”
The background color of the map has been changed to improve visibility and reading different trails on the map, Sturgis said. Another new feature is every trail will be indexed with numbers and color coding.
The Summer Trail Map has been released each year since 2002, and Sturgis said the groups want to continue to make it as user friendly as possible.
“It’s all in the details,” he said.
The 2011 Summer Trail Map will be available at local sports and bikes shops, the visitor center, and other locations around town, for a $5 donation. The map will also be available for download at www.basinrecreation.org and www.mountaintrails.org .