Other than the picture ridden analysis page. This could potentially be the longest. I had a lot of problems, though I imagine everybody did. My biggest problem first off was tackling a project that I had difficulty getting data for. In order to make it easier for myself I choose a smaller, close to home project of Burnaby Mountain and in doing so created more work for myself. On the upside, there is now a 25ft contour shapefile of Burnaby Mountain if someone could figure out how to get it into the correct coordinates. I spent several hours trying to use the mouse a digitizer to convert my digitized shapefile into real world coordinates. I never did succeed however, very conveniently the TIFF file that I scaned when put in meters mode was close enough to be accurate(25 meters over 1000 meters) for the purpose of evaluating slope. The next problem I had was trying to get the slope raster data to be somehow related to the vector network data. It never did happen and I spent too much time on it. Instead I used the methof mentioned above, of using short arcs and figguring out which contours the endpoints fell in the determining the slope from the change in height over the length of the segment.
In general the digitizing of the contours was very lossy, lots more mouse click and vertex moves should have been preformed to build a more accurate model. The method for computing height was also very lossy This could have caused problems, but in the case of mountain bikers, the exact hard information was not necessary, the general idea of where to go and what to expect.
