April

Dobson Trail Hiking

Organization
New Brunswick Community College

Author
Mariette Hachey, Dean Searle, Philippe Arseneau

ESRI Software
ArcGIS Desktop 8.3 & 9.0, Spatial Analyst

Data Sources
Service New Brunswick, DTDB1998 Topographic 1:10 000

Description
The Dobson Trail is a continuous footpath through the Albert County wilderness stretching 57.75 kilometers from Riverview, New Brunswick to the boundary of Fundy National Park near Alma, New Brunswick. The trail is made for all seasons traversing a variety of woodland terrain. The trail winds through soft and hardwood stands, crosses brooks and rivers, touches a lake ascends slopes, some gradual others steep, to reach magnificent look-outs including Prosser Brook Ridge and the spectacular Hayward Pinnacle. Currently you can purchase a small pocket book called "On Foot to Fundy" which is a hiker's guide to the Dobson Trail. This book describes the trail in nine different sections and is accompanied by a small map. The original map was black and white, printed on a waterproof paper and highlighted the trail in red but was of poor quality. The intention was to create a map of higher quality that would accompany the book by following the same scheme of being divided into nine sections. In order to improve the quality and accuracy of the map, a grade global positioning system (GPS) unit (Leica GS50) was used to collect data for the entire trail over a three day period in October 2003. The data was then used to improve the quality of the map that had simply been hand digitized from old out-dated paper maps.

Acknowledgements
Geneviève Hachey; Derek Couture