Steep Slopes
A student from the Environmental Decision Making class designed her project for a subsequent Geographic Information Systems course to create additional planning resources for Houghton County. She chose to map steep slopes for the county overall and by township. Slope is important because it determines the suitability or limitations of a soil type for some land uses (such as sewage disposal, pasture, recreation or engineering).

In fact, county soil surveys often list several ranges of slope gradients for a given soil type. Slope categories chosen for this project reflect the Natural Resources Conservation Service soil survey classification system: 0-12% = nearly level to gently rolling; 12-25% = rolling to hilly; and greater than 25% = steep to very steep.

Note that on the maps, areas of 0-12% slope appear green, the base color of the map, 12-25% slope is yellow, and slope greater than 25% is red. Each small colored square represents the average slope of an area 30 meters square (roughly 10,000 square feet).

The maps below are available in smaller JPEG files for viewing and larger PDF files for printing.

Houghton County (202 KB gif) pdf (264 KB pdf)
Adams Township (87 KB gif) pdf (274 KB pdf)
Calumet Township (61 KB gif) pdf (213 KB pdf)
Chassell Township (64 KB gif) pdf (236 KB pdf)
Duncan Township (132 KB gif) pdf (368 KB pdf)
Elm River Township (111 KB gif) pdf (304 KB pdf)
Franklin Township (37 KB gif) pdf (165 KB pdf)
Hancock Township (52 KB gif) pdf (183 KB pdf)
Laird Township (101 KB gif) pdf (346 KB pdf)
Osceola Township (39 KB gif) .pdf (172 KB pdf)
Portage Township and City of Houghton(72 KB gif) pdf (297 KB pdf)
Quincy Township and City of Hancock(37 KB gif) pdf (90 KB pdf)
Schoolcraft Township (55 KB gif) pdf (218 KB pdf)
Stanton Township (71 KB gif) pdf (262 KB pdf)
Torch Lake Township (53 KB gif)pdf (206 KB pdf)