The rise of do-it-yourself mapping services like everytrail.com has me wondering about the livelihood of people like Tom Harrison, who divides his time between walking all the great trails of California and creating basically the best maps of those trails on the market. (Disclosure: a few years back Harrison paid me $100 to advertise his maps for three months here mostly because he was charmed that I asked him; his maps sell themselves so he didn’t need the help; nor, I imagine, did he get much from my feeble foray into online marketing.)
I tracked down all the top-quality maps for Bay Area trails and compiled them in my online map store. If you buy one from Amazon, I get a few nickels to buy more maps.
But to get back to the point: Are any of these online mapping sites of any use for hikers? I found out the other day when creating my Henry Coe hike map (an advertisement for hiring a professional if there ever was one) that mapmaking done even half-right is tedious, painstaking and best left to those who have climbed the illustration-software staircase (which always seems 100 floors high and keeps adding stories).
A map done right needs all the following:
- Not just the trails I’ve hiked, but all the trails nearby.
- Those little red numbers indicating miles between trail junctions.
- That little arrow thingy showing declination (true north vs. magnetic north).
- Springs, lakes, ponds, creeks, rivers.
- Other points of interest and attractions.
- Some way to convey elevation, whether by contour lines or shaded relief
How many of your average GPS-mash-up maps have more than a couple of these requirements?
Having said this, the GPS mash-ups do something a professional map can’t: allow regular folks to say “here’s where I went” and draw it on an approximation of a map, encouraging others to go there too. Everytrail in particular also allows you to keep a log of your travels across multiple venues and attach photographs, making little GPS-enabled photo albums. Neat, but not cartography.
I find myself stopping by VirtualParks.org and buying the $1 PDF maps quite often if I’m going to new parks in the Santa Cruz mountains. They fill a niche because the San Mateo Parks Department has great trails but lousy trail maps, and some of the state parks down by Santa Cruz aren’t staffed except on the weekends, so it’s impossible to buy a map on days when the gate kiosk is unstaffed. These have all the requirements listed above; the e-commerce software gets a bit cranky at times but nothing I haven’t been able to work out.
The GPS mash-up maps are a function of their medium: cool on a computer screen, not so cool on an actual trail. You wouldn’t want to be lost in the woods with a 72dpi printout as your only hope of getting unlost. Especially if starts to rain.
(So check this out: Ol’ Mr. Harrison is not so old school after all: some of his maps are available as iPhone apps.)
Like a book in one’s hands – as opposed to a Kindle – nothing can replace the detailed, textured, nuanced information that a trail map provides. Even if I know where I am, I have a good map of the area, because it’s always fun to scour them while you’re there and check elevations, nearby points of interest, springs, creek origins, reconfirm mileage.
I was thinking about my hiking blog a bit, and how I do not provide a whit of information about how to get there, where the trailhead is, how long the loop is or which way to turn, or a computer-drawn personalized map of the route taken, as do 99% of most hiking blogs. I wonder if I should have these elements. Hell no! That’s not what my hiking narratives are about – they’re more akin to gushing torrents of consciousness to put you in the moment, there, alongside me, exploring the infinite and minute wonders of nature all about, to make you want to go do same. Figure all the other stuff out on your own. The lyrical ramblings of Gambolin’ Man are not meant to be directional, informative, how-to, or practical.
For on-trail use, a water-resistant paper map can’t be beat. I use electronic mapping tools for my pre-trip planning and my post-trip evaluations. I am currently exploring this topic on my blog. See http://tinyurl.com/csexuy for Part One.
I agree with gambolin man. There is nothing like spreading a big map over my living room floor and visualizing my next big hike. I use the big maps for the ‘big picture’ planning and dreaming (for which the Tom Harrison maps are *perfect*), then move on to computer-based mapping tools, particularly NG Topo. In topo I can print out exactly what I need for a longer hike. For identifying distant points of interest when I’m out on the trail I’ll use the built in topos on my GPS.
But it all starts with that big map on the floor….
Tom Harrison Maps are indeed amazing and sometimes I buy them simply for their clarity. But I grew up on USGS Topo Maps and there is reassurance in the 1:24,000 scale and the large format of the map. I can’t get used to 8.5×11 printed maps and don’t have access to a large format printer.
Lately I have tried offroute.com which prints full size standard or custom Topos on waterproof paper with shaded relief and UTM overlay options for only a couple bucks more that the direct-from-USGS Topos. They suffer from slight blurring with the shaded relief option, but overall pretty good.
What they said.
Paper maps are indispensable for the start and end: the big picture “dreaming” and when you’re actually on the trail. The mapping software comes in between, when I’m trying to analyze the route I just dreamed up or hiked….
I realize that the mapping software can generate paper maps (on waterproof stuff no less) but I’ve never had very good luck with them, both in terms of resolution/print quality and surviving the weather. (Hmmm, maybe I should look at offroute)