[pct-l] National Geographic replacement for halfmile maps

David Hough reading PCT-L pctl at oakapple.net
Fri Jul 10 19:34:54 CDT 2020


I planned some dayhiking in sections P, Q, and R, and noticed National
Geographic map booklet 1006 at my REI, so I bought one to see how it
compared with the halfmile maps it superseded.

First the good news - smaller, lighter, more compact, 
less likely to fall out of your pocket, 
less likely to blow away if it does fall.    
The contour lines seem to be consistent across the trail - no metric contours.

Much more surrounding territory shown - which can be helpful if you are
trying to follow obscure Forest Service roads to remote trailheads to
do short dayhikes.     Of course, all maps of Forest Service roads tend
to be misleading, especially for those of us who are easily misled, especially
in deep canyons where GPS is unreliable.     It's worse in the Klamath NF,
where all the high altitude road markers tend to be vandalized or weatherized
into illegibility.      

Now the bad news - there's a big difference between 1:75000 and 1:31680.
The type size on the new maps is barely legible with elderly eyes.   The 
contour lines are too thick and it's very hard to discern small potential bivy
spots on saddles, for instance.      There is no running legend of waypoints
on this map as there was on each halfmile sheet.     My conclusion was that
the new maps are mainly useful for planning and as a backup in case you
drop your smart phone in a creek - 
where perhaps you kept the maps you actually navigated by.
The trail notes now on pctmap.net are keyed to the National Geographic map
booklets, and so harder to use with the previous maps.

If I had understood what was coming, I would have downloaded the last 
complete consistent set of halfmile maps, tracks, waypoints, and trail notes.
I'd be willing to pay National Geographic for that now - or the PCTA
or halfmile - whoever owns the IP.

I do have a fairly recent (2018?) set of printed halfmile maps from Yogi,
that I will have to be careful with.     After she quit selling them,
I bought an hp452 color printer which does a pretty good job of printing
out halfmile maps that I had downloaded the pdf for.

Unfortunately the trail notes
that I have were printed out at various times and aren't necessarily 
consistent with the maps. 


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