great-smokies-circuit

GSMNP 900 Miler Information

Resources for “completing the map” of all official hiking trails in Great Smoky Mountains National Park.

Datasets & Maps

• Great Smoky Mountains 900 Miler Club - Official website. Includes Excel file with list of required trails. (My 900 Miler Club Hike Log in Google Sheets is an attempt at improving the Excel file.)
• ArcGIS Online Trail Map - My original creation with elevation gain/loss data and estimated hiking times. Trails, roads, and points of interest are overlaid on the current $1 Map that was georeferenced with Map Warper.
  • lines_20250211.geojson
  • points_20250211.geojson
  • dollar_map_20250108.tif
  • elevation_20250212.tif - Derived from USGS 3DEP 1-meter Standard DEMs.
• outrageGIS Trail PDF Maps - Excellent maps for offline use with Avenza Maps app. I relied on these maps heavily for identifying likely water sources during my circuit hike.
• NPS/USGS GSMNP 2016 Topographic Map Bundle - 7.5-minute quadrangle maps (1:24,000 scale) for use with Avenza Maps app.
• USGS topoView - Downloadable maps from the Historical Topographic Map Collection (1947-1992) and US Topo series (2009-present). GeoPDF files are easily imported into Avenza Maps app.
• grsm-nps.opendata.arcgis.com - Authoritative park datasets provided by the National Park Service.
• GSMNP Landforms - Tom Dunigan’s excellent data archive of waterfalls, peaks, balds, rock formations, sinkholes, and more. Includes trail elevation profiles and historic maps. No longer actively maintained.

Books

• Hiking Trails of the Smokies - The Brown Book. Current edition (5th) published in 2012.
• Hiking Trails of the Great Smoky Mountains - The Green Book. Current edition (2nd) published in 2014. The original “Blue Book” edition (1996) is also highly recommended.
• Day Hiker’s Guide to All the Trails in the Smoky Mountains - See the Etnier section below for more details.

Fastest Known Times (FKTs)

There are two supported map completion FKTs recoginzed at fastestknowntime.com. A successful self-supported map completion FKT has not yet been reported.

Nancy East & Chris Ford - Supported Mixed-Gender Team FKT (September 4 to October 3, 2020)

• Gaia GPS Tracking
• Tableau Visualization - My analysis of daily progress overlaid on the $1 Map.
• Cue Sheet - My turn-by-turn re-creation of FKT progress in Google Sheets.
• GeoJSON Point File - Derived from the Gaia GPS recordings, for analysis in QGIS, Atlas, etc.
• Chasing the Smokies Moon - Nancy East’s memoir of the hike, published in October 2021.

Jeff Woody - Supported Male FKT (July 23 to August 25, 2020)

• Strava GPS Tracking - Scroll to the week of July 20-26, 2020 for recordings.
• Tableau Visualization - My analysis of daily progress overlaid on the $1 Map.
• Cue Sheet - My turn-by-turn re-creation of FKT progress in Google Sheets.
• GeoJSON Point File - Derived from the Strava recordings, for analysis in QGIS, Atlas, etc.

Efficient Map Completions

Matthew Kirk - Great Smoky Postman (December 2019 to October 2020)

• Great Smoky Postman Summary - Blog post from October 28, 2020. Lowest known distance of 906.1 miles.
• Tableau Visualization - My analysis of daily progress overlaid on the $1 Map.
• Cue Sheet - My turn-by-turn re-creation of Postman progress in Google Sheets.

Eric West - Great Smokies Circuit (2019-2022)

• Tableau Visualization - My analysis of daily progress overlaid on the $1 Map.
• Cue Sheet - My turn-by-turn re-creation of 900 Miler progress in Google Sheets.
• GeoJSON Point File - Derived from my Garmin inReach Mini and phone recordings, for analysis in QGIS, Atlas, etc.
• Permits - Permits issued by the Backcountry Office for the entirety of my Circuit hike.
• completingthemap.com - My forthcoming website with details on attempting a self-supported map completion.

Elizabeth Etnier - Day Hiker’s Guide to All the Trails in the Smoky Mountains (Book)

• Tableau Visualization - My analysis of hike-by-hike progress overlaid on the $1 Map.
• Cue Sheet - My hike-by-hike re-creation of 900 Miler progress in Google Sheets.
• smokymountainshiking.com - The author’s website.

Routing / Optimization

This is the area of greatest interest to those attempting an efficient map completion. The Traveling Salesman Problem is perhaps the most studied routing optimization problem, but the goal of the TSP is to visit points (nodes), not lines (edges/arcs). Hiking all the trails in the park is an arc routing problem that most closely resembles the Chinese Postman Problem.

The impact of elevation change makes the trail network “windy”, as it takes more time/energy to travel uphill. For a self-supported journey, the trail network is also “rural” in that roads or non-required trails can be used to more efficiently complete the map. The Windy Rural Postman Problem (WRPP) is reasonably well known in the literature and algorithms have been created to calculate optimal (or near-optimal) solutions.

• Postman Problems - Python code for solving the Chinese Postman Problem (CPP) and the Rural Postman Problem (RPP). I used this to plan my Great Smokies Circuit hike.
• ArcRoutingLibrary - Java code with solvers for many Postman Problem variants. The code is nearly 10 years old and I have not figured out how to run it on WRPP problems.
• The Chinese-Postman-Method - Interactive tutorial that illustrates the algorithm for solving Postman problems.