Mississippi River Trail Project

I downloaded this .gpx file and it contains two routes: WI 1 North Section and WI 2 South Section; however, the appear to be the same route?

I'm looking for a gpx file for the MRT for the stuff north of the Twin Cities...

The MRT could turn out to be a bucket list item for me and I will be watching this thread with anticipation. I would love to run this route on both types of bikes. Thanks to everyone who has done so much work already. When I get time to ride, I will be looking for a list of the sections that have not been completed yet. I may be able to dedicate some of my vacation to helping out as things progress.

Hey Jamie were those Arkansas tracks of any use to you?

Anyone working on Itasca to Twin Cities?

Nothing for Minnesota has been done yet. You can check out the MRT website, which has pretty good maps, though nothing that you can download (that I know of).

As for Wisconsin, when I open the route in MapSource, the two routes are different. They connect right around the MN/IA border.

Charlie, I never did get them. Recall that I mistyped my email address? Nothing ever showed up to my email box, even after I corrected the typo. Sorry about that.

I'd like to add MN to the project!

Jamie

Great thread. I've been planning to ride the Great River Road for some time, but after reading this thread, the Mississippi River Trail is definately more of what I'm really looking for. I am currently deployed to Afghanistan, but hope to ride this route next summer after I get back. Thanks for all the helpful information.

I want to do this entire route from Kentucky to Minnesota. I grew up there and would like to visit family during the summer of 2012. It's tough to determine if there is one place for all the routes and I am not a GPS wizard for joining multiple routes, so I figure, if'n I start working my planning now, maybe I can find what I need. Anyone have all the pieces and parts put together or can you recommend a place to begin collecting the parts that are available?

This will be an epic adventure for me. I've done this trip, superslab, in one weekend-there and back again, but traveling over two weeks on the MRT will be a completely different experience.

I am from the southern end of this route. Was born down there and spent a lot of my life in the Empire/Buras/Boothville/Venice area. There are some smaller roads that are more bike friendly besides the main highway that could give you options, but you will have to get on and off it all the way to Venice. The main highway is very high speed and can be dangerous.

Another option is there is a road on top the levee system. It's shell and rock, but you can see the river. It will be hard going on a road bike.

One thing that's bothered me about this project is that the route files are rather inconsistent. A few months back I sent one of the routes to the Garmin Nuvi in my car, and when it read the directions to me, each via point had a nonsense name. Also, those damn blue flags which show up in the route are annoying. And I've figured out that some of the route files are already calculated, which is not what I'd like.

I've slowly learned how to fix those things, so over the course of the next couple of weeks or months, I'll be making the data more consistent and professional.

Meanwhile, anyone wanna work on the head and tail of this project, Minnesota and Louisiana?

Jamie

I personally rode most of the Illinois MRT (or what I could of the route). The very far northern part I estimated by using Vertices, Google Maps, Google Street View, and Mapsource.

For the most part, the route should be ready to go, cleaned up, and pretty.



Jamie

Jamie you can save the file as a .gdb and then de-blue flag it using WinGDB3. It works like a champ, just browse to the file, choose a file and chose it. Next give the output file a name and location. Choose option number 3 and the flags are gone in your newly made file.

Thanks for posting the Illinois stretch, I live near the headwaters of the Miss'ipi in Minnesota, but I'm from the Tennessee River Valley in Northern Alabama. I know some nice roads going south along the river to Iowa, and could make it home once I got to the Land between the Lakes, so your waypoints fill in the gap very nicely.

Anyhoo, I'd love to try and help you fill in the northern part of the trip. Gonna have to wait a few months for the ground truthing, however....
Dave

The way I had been removing the Blue Flags was to use a text editor to change "Flag, Blue" to "Waypoint." And then I discovered that the most recent version of Mapsource doesn't use the flags any more, so as I re-do the routes, the blue flags should be gone.

Jamie

I've remade the Wisconsin route and updated the link: http://www.advrider.com/forums/showpost.php?p=11580251&postcount=23

If you have previously saved the route for Wisconsin, I recommend downloading version 2.

A couple years ago Cannonshot sent me the track for Wisconsin, including some clever reroutes where the MRT followed a rails-to-trails line. I simply converted his track to a route and posted it here. The result was that all the via points were arbitrarily placed and had meaningless numerical names. Additionally, the route was split into two sections, north and south.

I've gone through the entire Wisconsin route, following Cannonshots original data and made a clean route in Mapsource. It should be ready to go.

A note: there were some discrepancies between the tracklog and the route as posted on Vertices, even taking into account the bike-only sections. I've gone with Cannonshots data, as I consider it to be more reliable. Thanks again to Cannonshot for his help with this.

Jamie

Let us revive this from the dead. I did a large part of the LA portion of this recently, but didn't save tracks.... I want to do the rest in the near future. It is great riding, maybe you could join me for some of it Jamie.

Dead? This thread is far from dead. The project isn't yet complete.

Greg, that'd be a great ride. I've also done most or all of the Louisiana portion, though like you I didn't save my tracks. I do have a few waypoints but I ran into some discrepancies between the signs on the roads and the MRT maps available at that time.

Jamie

I didn't know for sure if this area is covered---but you guys can use this info if you need it.

The ride report is here:

http://www.bigdogadventures.com/1RiverRide.htm

And I've included the gps file----the closed bridge waypoints should be ignored after the bridge gets fixed.

Following this tracklog----will get you as close to the river as possible on both the Kentucky and Missouri side.
They are doing some repairs to the levee down there---so it's possible riding thru on the levee could change.

BigDog

Good, I didn't think it was dead, but it hadn't been updated lately.

We can talk soon.

As you may know, weekdays are easiest for me. Perhaps a Sunday/Monday/Tuesday or even midweek, then I wouldn't have to ask off from work at all.

Jamie

I checked with my Grandpa who works for Plaquemines Parish which is just south of New Orleans and goes until the road ends, riding on the levee system there in any sort of vehicle is illegal.

Some of the locals do it on small sections which is also illegal, but if the cops see you going all the way down on the levee, you will get in trouble. Looks like Highway 23 to Venice is your safest bet on the west bank.