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I visit North Georgia once or twice a year with friends, and one of the primary activities there is hiking. Now, hiking is a lot nicer if you know where you are and where you're going. I hadn't really expended too much energy towards trying to find good maps; I got a Forest Service map from the rangers office, and it shows Forest Service roads and creeks and streams. Otherwise I relied on my Garmin Nuvi to get me to places.
Last trip, though, we ran into the limitations of a badly marked trail, and I've been increasingly annoyed with the lack of a map that actually shows available hiking trails and other information that is useful for orienting yourself.
I recently moved my office, and in the process stumbled upon the Finnish "terrain map" of the region around my cottage. Looking at it caused me enough irritation to write this rant. You can check out a snippet of the map here. The legend is a bit hidden, but can be found here. (It's printed on the margin of the physical map together with two coordinate systems, and declination adjustments.
It should be pretty obvious from perusing the legend that the map has an incredible amount of information. It shows every building, color-coded by type, which often makes it trivial to locate yourself -- just find a cluster of buildings, then find a matching formation on the map. It has topographic information (the narrow dashed, narrow, and thick brown lines plus things like ridges), the type of vegetation, the type of shore, water depth, marine navigational features, wells, type of wetlands by ease of traversal, footpaths and roads, ditches, etc. Yet despite all of this the map is not cluttered and very easy to use as a basic map without ever looking at the legend. This isn't a fluke, either -- you can buy one of these for any point in the country. The organization the produces them is the Finnish equivalent of the USGS, a government agency. They also have offices in many cities, where you can have them print you custom maps with any and all the information you want, such as property lines and folio numbers, for a pretty low fee.
In contrast, my Forest Service map has no real way to tell an interstate from a gravel road -- it's completely useless for automotive navigation, and it lacks a ton of basic information. The USGS topo maps that I've been able to find are similar, and the topo curves tend to overwhelm everything else. I checked out the handheld Garmin units, and they don't have a detailed topo map of Georgia or Florida at all. Yet, the land of private mapping, USGS and the birth of services like Mapquest surely can give me a decent hiking map?
So, a challenge to you, dear readers -- point me to a place to find a good map of regions of America!
Last trip, though, we ran into the limitations of a badly marked trail, and I've been increasingly annoyed with the lack of a map that actually shows available hiking trails and other information that is useful for orienting yourself.
I recently moved my office, and in the process stumbled upon the Finnish "terrain map" of the region around my cottage. Looking at it caused me enough irritation to write this rant. You can check out a snippet of the map here. The legend is a bit hidden, but can be found here. (It's printed on the margin of the physical map together with two coordinate systems, and declination adjustments.
It should be pretty obvious from perusing the legend that the map has an incredible amount of information. It shows every building, color-coded by type, which often makes it trivial to locate yourself -- just find a cluster of buildings, then find a matching formation on the map. It has topographic information (the narrow dashed, narrow, and thick brown lines plus things like ridges), the type of vegetation, the type of shore, water depth, marine navigational features, wells, type of wetlands by ease of traversal, footpaths and roads, ditches, etc. Yet despite all of this the map is not cluttered and very easy to use as a basic map without ever looking at the legend. This isn't a fluke, either -- you can buy one of these for any point in the country. The organization the produces them is the Finnish equivalent of the USGS, a government agency. They also have offices in many cities, where you can have them print you custom maps with any and all the information you want, such as property lines and folio numbers, for a pretty low fee.
In contrast, my Forest Service map has no real way to tell an interstate from a gravel road -- it's completely useless for automotive navigation, and it lacks a ton of basic information. The USGS topo maps that I've been able to find are similar, and the topo curves tend to overwhelm everything else. I checked out the handheld Garmin units, and they don't have a detailed topo map of Georgia or Florida at all. Yet, the land of private mapping, USGS and the birth of services like Mapquest surely can give me a decent hiking map?
So, a challenge to you, dear readers -- point me to a place to find a good map of regions of America!
