Route Scouting - Level II

I found the Pickens County GIS system online, so I was able to scout the property on the route I already discussed.

 This is a GIS map of a portion of Hwy 133 from Six Mile to Clemson. Each plot of land is denoted in black borders, and I have highlighted Hwy 133 in red. The small grey dots within the plots are buildings. As you can see, a majority of the plots adjacent to the road (and therefore capable of diverting the bike path from the direct roadside) are very small. This is likely residential property, and the more small residential plots that must be traversed by the path, the more bureaucracy, legal wrangling, and potential expense must be incurred as more and more property owners are dealt with. A more efficient strategy is to find plots of land adjacent to the road with large amounts of road frontage. In the context of this area of Pickens County, these are likely farms. Regardless of what the specific tracts are, since they offer a great deal of road frontage and are all owned by the same owner, they can more easily be negotiated with for the right to let the trail wander onto their property.

White-filled boxes marked by letters show such tracts of land. Sites A, B, and D are all owned by private citizens, and from the building markers, they are composed primarily of open land. The topography of the map suggests this land is relatively flat, too. Each plot is over 50 acres, so with that much open land and only one property owner to deal with, these would be good spots at which the trail could be purposely diverted from the road to create a more scenic bike path. Sites C, E, F, and G are portions of the Clemson experimental forest, and so they are guaranteed to be somewhat scenic, and hopefully the university will be willing to allow some of its land to be used for a bike path.

Yellow-filled boxes marked with numbers show points of interest that the trail could make special efforts to be diverted towards. Site 1 is one of the main entrances to the Issaqueena Lake section of the experimental forest (with access to many rugged trails). Site 2 is Daniel High School. Site 3 is the approximate location of Twelve Mile Recreation Area.

The next and final step of this process is to parse all this information into some sort of map that is user friendly and can be thrown onto our brochure.

-Cailen