Joshua Tree rock formation coordinates

README.md

Joshua Tree rock formation coordinates

Converted from the lists at:

• JoshuaTreeVillage.com: Is this rock in the Wilderness?
• Joshua Tree National Park Wilderness Rock Climbing Study (Appendix IV)

These both seem to be subsets of some NPS master list that isn't otherwise available online. NPS.gov responded:

Hi, sorry to take so long to get back to you. Your email got kicked around to about five people trying to find the list of wilderness and non-wilderness named rocks in JOTR that used to be available on our website. Long story short, they are no longer on our website and cant seem to be tracked down.

V-Z mentions a file called "Attributes of Rocks.shp" but that's the only other clue I can find.

Update: Erik Murdock responded and said that the original data is in the park library on a CD. It was originally mapped by him and other volunteers around 2004 during the study linked above.

Coordinates were converted from NAD27 / UTM zone 11N (Easting/Northing) to WGS 84 (latitude/longitude) using the cs2cs command:

cs2cs +init=epsg:26711 +to +init=epsg:4326 -f "%.17f" coordinates.txt

This (like all tables of factual numerical information) is in the public domain.

JTree.csv

The coordinates for Mistaken Rock seem to be ... mistaken. There is no rock at that location. Mountain Project lists 34.06358,-116.1733

I got a CSV from Mountain Project and merged them so they could update their listings:

I’ll work on a script to iterate them and identify all the places with differences of more than a few meters. Nice data find!

I was able to get reliable-looking data for 100 areas. There were some errors, and most of the differences were small and I think MP’s data was slightly more correct. But fixing 100 areas is solid!