Mapping Local Bike Trails in Surfer

One of the things that drew me to Colorado is the wide range of activities that are available to its residents. Among the many available activities is biking. Whether you prefer mountain biking or street biking, there are multitudes of trails to explore for all skill levels. With spring on its way, I decided to map out the biking trails around Denver and Golden that I want to explore this year.

I was able to use Surfer's download online maps and download online grids features to download a high resolution aerial image and the topography for my areas of interest. I then went in search of bike trail information and found a great collection of data on the Denver Regional Data Catalog website. I combined these data sets to create the map below.

 Since I am still fairly new to street biking, I also wanted to color code the trails to indicate which are on street and which aren't. I used Surfer's base symbology feature to color the trails based on the trail type attribute. I also decided that it would be nice to know which trails are in areas with lots of hills so I performed some calculations on the downloaded topography grid to get the slope and added that information to the map below.

Now that I have a finished bike trail map of the area, I can decide which trails I want to tackle first as the weather gets warmer. I can also use this map to help determine how to build up my endurance and improve my power going up hills.