Welcome to Canuck Engineering

What is the Google Earth Project? It is an idea I came up with while playing with the great free software www.earth.google.com The idea is to document favorite slope sites around Colorado, the USA, and the World. The idea is to compose a central slope database of *.kmz Google Earth files containing Placemarks and descriptions of popular slope sites.

How do I participate in the project? Participation is easy.

1. First you need to download a free installation of Google Earth from www.earth.google.com

2. Second you need to find your state or country's file and check to see if the slope has been documented already. If so, great.

3. If you can't find your state or country's file listed, this means one has yet to be generated. Generating a *.kmz file is easy. First you need setup a folder to store your Placemarks. Call the folder your state or country's name or abbreviation.

4. Next you need to locate your favorite slope sites and add a Placemark to the display on the slope site. Call the placemark the local name of the slope that generally recognized in the slope community followed by 'RC Slope'. This is important for ease of searching once the data is added to the KeyHole community data. Include a short description of the site (size, hiking?, DS able, etc.), what wind directions are good, and any local important rules (e.g. don't land in the park). The more information given the more useful this will be to other viewers.

5. Once you have all your favorite slopes with Placemarks in your folder, right click on the folder and hit save as and call the name of the file your state or countries name.

6. Next email me a note to googleearthproject@canuckengineering.com with the subject line including your state or country's name and the words 'New Slope Sites'. I will take over from here and add you new slope sites to an existing file or add your file to the database. Be patient as I will update the site once a week or so with all the new data.

7. About once a month or so, I plan on posting the data collected to the KeyHole community and every can then find the slope sites directly from the Google Earth software. It is very important to follow the naming conventions with your Placemark names to make searching for slope sites easy. Remember to include 'RC Slope' in the placemark name. There are many thousands of placemarks in the KeyHole Community system already and we need a convent way to search for slope sites only.

Where are the files? Until I come up with a better solution the files will be stored on my website.

www.canuckengineering.com/GoogleEarthFiles/

How do I update a Placemark? If you find errors or problems with any of the entries, or you want to add some details to the placemarks already there. Click edit on the Placemark, add the data or correct any problems, save it as it's own file and send to googleearthproject@canuckengineering.com with the subject line including the state or country's name and the words 'Additions'.

For more fun check out the cool overlays you can download on www.googleearthhacks.com

Updated Files Feb. 2 2006