Bringing the Katy Trail to Life

Late June 2026 is our target capture window — chosen for the full leaf-on canopy that defines the Katy in summer, longer daylight hours, and stable trail conditions after spring rain. The 30-mile segment is fully funded by Terrain360 — no cost to DNR, NPS, the Trust, Magnificent Missouri, or any partner.

Capture is performed on a single continuous push: a calibrated 360° rig with synchronized GPS, recording every meter of trail at roughly walking pace. Most segments take 2–3 days in the field. Post-processing — image stitching, GPS alignment, blurring of any incidental faces or plates, and tile generation — runs another 2–4 weeks. Public imagery goes live on terrain360.com shortly after, alongside the existing Missouri River and L&C NHT maps.

We’re asking the people who steward the Trail. The choice is being shaped by three lenses, in this order: (1) what the trail’s stewards prioritize — DNR, Missouri State Parks, Magnificent Missouri, friends groups; (2) heritage value tied to the Lewis & Clark return-route corridor; and (3) visitor demand and trip-planning utility for first-time riders, hikers, and accessibility users.

Candidate stretches we’d be proud to feature:

• Rocheport tunnel and the Missouri River bluffs — the only MKT tunnel on the trail, and the bluffs where Lewis & Clark recorded the pictographs on June 7, 1804.
• McKittrick → Hermann via the Christopher S. Bond bike/ped bridge into the historic wine corridor.
• Treloar — Ted & Pat Jones Welcome Center, the trail’s first-ever welcome center.
• Defiance / Augusta wine country — wooded bluffs, river views, the first U.S. American Viticultural Area.
• St. Charles terminus — the eastern end and Lewis & Clark’s May 1804 departure point.
• Or any 30-mile combination the partner orgs prioritize.

Cast your vote on which stretch we feature →

The 30-mile demonstration is intended to seed the conversation about a full-corridor deployment. We expect the path forward to be collaborative and phased — Missouri DNR / State Parks line items, federal grants tied to the Lewis & Clark NHT, philanthropic match through the Lewis & Clark Trust, regional tourism funding, and corporate sponsorship are all live possibilities. We’ve structured the work so that every additional 30-mile block is independently fundable — partners don’t have to commit to the whole 240 to move forward.

Capture cadence at full deployment is roughly 30–50 miles per week of field time, weather permitting, plus post-processing. A complete 240-mile Katy corridor would publish in stages over one season once funded.

Free, permanent public access at terrain360.com, alongside the existing Missouri River and Lewis & Clark National Historic Trail maps. No paywall, no app — anything a visitor needs runs in the browser.

For partners we provide:

• Embeddable URLs — drop a specific mile or trailhead into your own website, blog post, grant application, or interpretive panel.
• ArcGIS / GeoJSON integration — geo-tagged imagery hooks into existing GIS workflows for DNR, NPS, and friends-group planning.
• Tile and image API access for partner orgs that want to build on top of it.
• Long-term archive — imagery is preserved as a baseline reference for the trail as it exists in 2026, available to researchers, historians, and engineers.

Terrain360’s posture on this corridor is the same as on the L&C NHT: captured once, free to the public, forever.

Ryan Abrahamsen — Terrain360 founder and the person doing the field capture work — ryan@terrain360.com or 804.677.1456. The fastest path is the partnership form on this page; it routes directly to Ryan and to the Lewis & Clark Trust.

Good fits for a conversation: DNR / Missouri State Parks staff, NPS L&C NHT, Magnificent Missouri, Katy Trail friends groups and chambers of commerce, trail-side businesses, accessibility advocates, and anyone working on the Rock Island corridor. We’re also open to introductions through the Trust — Jim Mallory, Executive Director, can flag partner conversations into the right channel.

The Katy parallels the Missouri River for most of its 240 miles — the same corridor Lewis and Clark traveled in 1804 and 1806. Terrain360 has already captured the Missouri end-to-end (Sioux City to the Confluence) as part of our NPS partnership on the Lewis & Clark NHT. Pairing river and trail in one experience unlocks use cases neither side does alone:

• Stewardship — DNR, NPS, and friends groups can review the same mile from both the river bank and the trail surface, comparing erosion, signage, vegetation, and access conditions across modes.
• Education and curriculum — a teacher can move between Lewis’s 1804 journal entry, the river view he described, and the modern trail at the exact same coordinate. We’re building this with classroom use in mind.
• Heritage and research — historians, archaeologists, and tribal partners get a unified visual record of a corridor that’s currently fragmented across maps, archives, and silo’d datasets.
• Trip planning and accessibility — paddlers, cyclists, hikers, and accessibility-focused visitors can plan multi-modal trips: paddle one direction, ride back, with confidence about every access point.

No other National Historic Trail has anything like this. The Katy demonstration is the first step toward making the L&C corridor — water and land, end-to-end — the most thoroughly documented historic trail in the country.