[pct-l] National Geographic replacement for halfmile maps

[Town Food]

It looks like archive.org still has the old trail notes and maps.  You 
may need to try a variety of dates to get all the files, but I saw at 
least some of the 2019 trail notes are available from a November 28th 
snapshot of the site at: 
https://web.archive.org/web/20191128224409/https://www.pctmap.net/trail-notes/

  -=Town Food

On 7/10/20 5:34 PM, David Hough reading PCT-L wrote:
> 
> 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 compared with the halfmile maps it superseded.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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