See through a hawk's eyes how a Land Trust trail runs along a mountain ridge...

Give the Google Earth KML file of our trails a test run. You may want to print this instruction page.  Comments invited. 
Special thanks to Board Member David Young of Intergraph for this wonderful addition to our website.

Once the environment is opened, for best viewing of The Land Trust of Huntsville & North Alabama Preserves, you will need to change some of the Google Earth settings.

1. In the ‘Places’ control, you should turn off all entries in ‘My Places’ and any other temporary places besides The Land Trust entry.  Uncheck entries to be turned off in the display.
  
2. In the ‘Layers’ control, be sure that ‘Terrain’ is checked on.

3. Select Tools>Options from the drop-down menus at the top of the window.  Select View tab in the Options dialog.  In this tab, there is a setting for Elevation Exaggeration.  If you plan on using three dimensional viewing, a value of 2 is recommended.

4. To use your mouse to move around the surface, and to access 3D mouse tips, see http://earth.google.com/userguide/v4/index.html#mouse   Such cool views - you can be a bird and skim above the treetops!

5. In the Places control, you can double click on specific trails, preserves, trailheads, etc., to jump to that location.  The map item you click will fit in the view, but the balloon tag may not actually touch the map item.  The location pointed to by the balloon tag is the center of the graphic for the map item.  For a curving trail, the tag may be misleading.  In the case of trails, or any other map items, Google Earth version 4.2.0181.2634 and higher have a transparency slider in the Places legend contain (center of left side).  Moving the slider will cause the trail or other map item to fade in and out of view.  Also the Places legend entry for each trail includes a color icon that will match the color of the trail.