USGS Releases New Topographic Maps of Colorado and Minnesota | Hacker News Reader

USGS Releases New Topographic Maps of Colorado and Minnesota

usgs.gov

37 pointsdw987111 comments

These new USGS GeoPDF quads are awesome, but... useless. Most of them do not have trails, secondary (dirt) roads and even forest coverage. These new Colorado sets apparently have trails in national forests, but a sample I looked at (Longs Peak quad in RMNP) had no trails still.

Since it's outdoorsmen that use these maps, having no trails makes them worthless.

Here's what I do. Go to the USGS store and download older maps in (georeferenced) raster PDF format. These are hi res scans of real USGS quad maps. Just pick up anything older than 2012/2013. Use Acroread to print each map in poster mode 75% scale landscape to two 11x17" pages. Splice the pages and you have pretty much perfect USGS quad. I just came back from a hike in Wind Rivers and I had 14 USGS quads with me, covering all of the range.

Another option is this:

http://caltopo.com/

This site creates a seamless map out of the same USGS maps. You can print via PDF using correct scale and paper size. This is great for custom maps (although I still prefer quads as mentioned above).

To USGS: nice try, but until you add all layers present on real maps these are not any good.

For heaven's sake, they are topo maps. They show topography.

No map is ever perfect. I already use a mix of quads for topography, and companion collections of trail maps. Trails need finer detail, and change more often than the land.

If you really need this, you could download the raster data (find the URLs via the National Map Viewer [1] for example) and add whatever type of road/trail/path you want on top using OpenStreetMap data.

[1] http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/

Nice. Although it bugs me to have the 'share this' bar on a government site annoyingly floating in the page.

'share this' isn't really a problem; getting government products to the people who paid for them is a good thing. The lack of an open and widely-used social networking interface probably is.

From another perspective: If the 'share this' button had only "e-mail" as an option, I doubt it would bother anyone.

Poor Alaska, forever uncharted territory :(

Apparently at least one government agency has not received the "national security" memo yet.

This material is arguably much more dangerous to national security than anything Snowden ever released.

Creating and publishing maps like this is pretty much the purpose of the US Geological Survey.

That, and running the earthquake site [1]. I show that to everybody I know when they move to the Bay Area or Seattle. It induces compulsive refreshing.

[1] http://tinyurl.com/l2w75wl

Yes, public data threatens national security. Arguably, the U.S. Census Bureau should remove population density figures because terrorists will know where the most people live.

How so?

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