Quote:
Originally Posted by KenM
River Miles for Ohio Rivers and Creeks
I was thinking about our paddle on the Pymatuning Creek this past Sunday, Aug 25, 2019 and started reading Matthew Smith's document that set the stage for it being designated as "Wild and Scenic" this past December 2018. Wow! 135 pages. An interesting read. There are considerable references to study locations and river mile marks.
So where do those river mileages come from? And where are they? I went down the "rabbit hole" googling for river mile distances.
Back in the Pymatuning study it was noted the river miles used were from the Ohio EPA. Bingo! I was expecting some sort of official information on our rivers. What I found was an electronic version of copies of topo maps (of the entire state of Ohio) that have hand measured and penciled in mileages along with some other mystery info. While this is hard to read and decipher it is the only source of river mileages that I am aware of other than some of the water trail maps. Possibly useful for planning out a trip.
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Ken, Thanks for the link. Those topo maps are tough to figure out! River mile might be the easiest of the hand-written items to decipher. I've seen a much cleaner map of the Allegheny that has river miles printed on it. Perhaps rivers that have more commercial traffic have better maps with mileage markers???
In the days before computer mapping, Ed Gertler, author of paddling guides for Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland and Delaware, once told me he used a piece of string to measure river distance for his guide books. He would mark the string in tenths of a mile according to the scale of the topo map he was consulting. Then he would carefully lay the string atop the map and conform it to the river as printed on the map and measure the distance between put ins and take outs. Not very high tech, but reasonably accurate.