Discovering Chapel Basin

Hi everyone! My project will focus on recreating and simplifying a map I used in August 2012 to hike the Chapel Basin loop at Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore in Michigan. I'm definitely a design amateur, but my goal is to create a piece that's simple, focusing on my favorite part of the trail, and I could hang up in my home (bathroom? Ha!) or make into a postcard for friends and family. The photo I've included shows Chapel Beach in the morning, with a view of Pictured Rocks' famous cliffs in the background.

The Chapel Basin loop features fairly moderate trails that take hikers through woods and beaches, past waterfalls and along the cliffs that jut out from the clear blue water of Lake Superior. One of my favorite aspects of this hike is the part of the trail that winds along the cliffs' edge. If you've never done this hike, it's well-worth the trip as Pictured Rocks has much to offer outdoor enthusiasts and photographers seeking a place that's both serene yet not too far off the beaten path.

• I am making this map to commerate a favorite hiking trip I took with my husband.
• I am the "expert" to create this map because I hiked the trail I'm documenting and did so recently.
• My target audience is my husband and house guests. I would like to frame and hang the final project in my home.
• See above. The project will be printed. I'm debating whether to break up this map into a series of smaller pieces that I could display together instead of one large map.
• The level of detail I'm planning to include thus far is color coding, along with short descriptions of must-visit places along the trail (i.e. best lunch spots, quiet places to nap, secluded beaches)
• I'd really like to embroider the trail shown on this map. I'm thinking the part of the trail that my husband and I hiked. We did the Chapel Basin loop, which is a little more than 10 miles, in one day, and I'd like to embroider that part of the trail differently. Any suggestions on the best way to do this? Types of paper, thread, process tips?

Here's the National Park Service's map that's the basis for my inspiration:

Here's a rough, incomplete sketch, with an incomplete key — yeah, I'm definitely not an artist, but I'm having fun! :)

Update 2: I added a bit more to my map's key, which I'd like to illustrate in color for the final version. I'm going to tweak the text for lunch spot to something like "secret, scenic lunch spot" or "must eat here." Not sure yet.

For the second class exercise, I ended up combining two of the instructions. Instead of using an imaginary city, I recreated the "spokes-style" streets of downtown Detroit with construction paper. First is a screenshot of the city. 

Here's my interpretation:

Final Project

I ended up taking a slightly different track with my project. I decided to go with a postcard-size map, with minimal detailing. I'm pretty happy with the end result. I chose brown card stock to make the thread color I used for the trail pop and colored pencils to fill in the rest of the lines, water, trail symbols and points of interest.

Detail: