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Comment by dmcdm | Hacker News Reader

I've been an avid backpacker for about 20 years now, and my go to for paper maps has always been USGS 7.5 minute quadrangles. As the article mentions, they are the "gold standard" for many.

Recently I've had some fun playing around with making my own in https://inkatlas.com/ which is a great idea and hope it stays viable for the creator.

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Their online store is, sadly, paleolithic. I tried to get some for a Grand Canyon trip, and it should be noted that when they say it might be 3 weeks before the maps are printed, they mean it. And if you call to check on the order, you're likely to find that it's been thrown over the wall to the printing department and nobody who answers the phone can answer a question. And if you'd like to cancel the order, it's too late because it's been thrown over the wall.

Great maps, lousy customer service, unfortunately :-(

For my Boy Scout troop’s bigger hikes, we would download the PDFs, mark our trails with highlighters in Preview, then print and laminate them to circumvent this issue. Some of the maps are still good to use today, a decade later.

Caveat that I have no idea if this is/was legal, but there’s ways to get physical copies of the maps without dealing with the bureaucracy :).

Mounting maps. When I was in the Boy Scouts we learned to mount USGS maps on cloth.

I found a blog post which describes the process.

When I was in the Scouts, we would visit the USGS office in Palo Alto, CA to buy topo maps. Visit the USGS site to see if there is a location near you.[2]

[1]: http://www.mrgus.net/2017/02/maps-for-going-afield.html [2]: https://www.usgs.gov/connect/locations

Super fascinating, I'm going to try this out. Thank you for sharing!

Where we were hiking, it was unfortunately raining non-stop for a couple of days, and the laminated plastic made a big difference.

But you can always read the map under covers or something, as long as it's transported in a watertight bag, I think the cloth solution might last longer than ours did (plastic forms creases).

You can buy the quads at one of the stores in the park

At the time, one could not. Nor could one buy the quads at REI in Vegas, nor in any of the stores I called in Flagstaff. I was surprised by this, believe me.

Interesting. I didn't know about Ink Atlas. Thanks.

I primarily use https://mytopo.com/.

Inkatlas looks cool, and they're from Estonia and use OSM data. The Estonian community is small but there are some very talented mappers there. Thanks for sharing, I didn't know of Inkatlas yet!

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