It's deer hunting season where I live: bow season started mid-September and gun season starts the weekend before Thanksgiving.
Matt and his wife have a vacation and hunting cabin half a mile south of me (1 mile if you are driving) and Matt is an avid bow hunter.

Matt has been hunting my land for about ten years now. During bow season he always hunts from tree stands (platforms in the tree or ladder stands strapped to the tree). He currently has about sixteen stands – six on his property and ten on mine. The most of the stands have names: the Orchard Stand, the Joe Stand (where his older son prefers to hunt), the Big Elm Stand, etc.

Last week Matt hit me with a new name – he was thinking of having Jim (a friend) hunt the Tunnel Stand. Huh? What tunnel?

We really needed a map with 'official' names for all the stands. Matt loves the idea, especially since he'd get a decent map of my property.

I started at the county web site and their GIS map system – it has all the public information that you can get from the Zoning Office.
Plus it has an aerial photo overlay.


Here is the GIS map, sized for printing on 11" x 17" paper. I'm the two large parcels in the center.
Iowa County 2015 Aerial 1 .jpg

Really weird texture on the woodlands.
The aerial photo was probably taken in early to mid April – the alfalfa fields have greened up, but the trees are still bare.
The woodland texture is tree shadows.
Dark tree shadows.

If you know where to look, you can see the tree, sort of...
Tree location vs shadow.png

I downloaded the highest resolution maps that I could access and stitched them together. Lots of compression artifacts in the maps, even though I downloaded them as PNG files. (Took a while with my slow internet connection.)

I used paths to outline all the important features. I really wanted to show the different types of land use for the non-woodland areas – crop land, land that was mowed to keep the man-eating multi-flora rose at bay (there's a story there), etc. I went down that rabbit hole for a while...

Here is the first version in simple topo style. The colors are from the USGS Topo map.
### Latest WIP ###
Property Map 1.png
Surprisingly, the png file is much smaller than the jpg file.

The next step is to add contour lines. The contour lines on the USGS map are way off in the wooded areas – they show a smooth change going from the ridge-top field to the valleys. In reality, much of the terrain is a combination of steep slopes and shallow slopes. I'm going to have to do a lot of fiddling to get them close to correct.

Comments and suggestions are welcome.