geojson

Today we’ll add towns along the trail route that are mentioned in the novels. I hesitate to call them towns, because in 1902, many of them consisted of a view indigenous people and sometimes a roadhouse. The method to add these locations will be to add a GeoJSON layer and loop through each town, adding a marker and popup with some info. The Data The data for the locations is from the GNIS database for Alaska, containing over 35,000 locations.

Background In 1902 the only way from the port of Valdez to the Fortymile gold fields was a nearly 400 mile trail through the Alaska wilderness. The Valdez-Eagle trail plays a key role in novels two and three. Adding the Trail to a Leaflet Map To add the trail to our map, we will convert it from a shapefile to GeoJSON. There is more than one way to do this—you could use ogr2ogr, but we chose to use QGIS, since it would not only convert it, but transform the coordinate system at the same time.