This project was inspired by the conversations my family and I have every time we go hiking: which trail should we hike? Everyone in my family has a different idea about what makes a trail a good hike. Thinking about what makes all of us most eager to hike a trail made me question what characteristics of a trail, universally, make a trail popular. With this project, I aim to provide a useful tool for helping others to determine which national park they want to visit and which trails they could hike based on their preferences. Additionally, this project will explore different trail aspects to determine what makes a trail most popular. Sections labeled "Note On Trail Popularity" throughout the website will provide more insight into the relationships between trail characteristics and trail popularity. This project is my Final Project for the College of William and Mary's Data Visualization (DATA 303), course.
The data was downloaded from a Kaggle dataset that was scraped from All Trails three years ago. All Trails is a hiking website/app that contains information regarding all known trails across the United States. This dataset contained 60 of the 63 National Parks and was the most comprehensive available at the time of the project. The data was cleansed using Python, and the visualizations were produced with Python and Tableau. The data was cleansed to create separate tables for each national park, as well as change many of the formatting errors in the file and units of measurement. All visualizations aim to help users discover the relationship(s) between trail features and trail popularity. Lastly, the website was coded using HTML, CSS, and Javascript.
Map, Features/Activities, and Route Stripcharts produced with Tableau. Bubble Plots and Trail Tables produced with plotly.
Main Page park search bar adapted from: https://www.w3schools.com/howto/howto_js_filter_lists.asp
Data Set downloaded from: https://www.kaggle.com/datasets/planejane/national-park-trails?resource=download
All Code Written By Courtney Maynard and can be found on GitHub
Contact: LinkedIn
Below are photos of my family and I hiking at Death Valley and Badlands National Parks, which inspired this project.