| Need a map for
tomorrow’s outing, but don’t have time to get to the Clubhouse,
Metsker, or REI? Taking a holiday in Utah and need four or five maps,
can’t get the USGS quads ordered in time, don’t want to
pay a hundred dollars for TOPO!? Signed up for a field trip but nary
a copy of the map you need to be found in any shop? Chances are you
can get the USGS map(s) you need, fast, from the World Wide Web. Here
are some ways.
- http://www.topozone.com/.
Free. Probably the easiest to use. Type in a place name anywhere in
the U. S. (spelled correctly) and then select from a list of all such
places in the nation. For example, enter “Mount Erie”,
find that there are two, select the one in Washington, and get your
map displayed on your screen, with various options. Scrolling and
taking screen shots may be the only way to print or save images to
file.
- http://terraserver-usa.com/.
Free. Much the same thing, but perhaps a bit clumsier. This site does,
however, encourage downloading (of the screen image), in JPEG format.
- If you like
to pay for maps that you can download, try http://data.geocomm.com/.
Every time I visit this site I find myself wishing I’d first
turned my GPS receiver on in trackback mode; I can never find my way
back to a previously visited page. It appears that you can buy 150
megabytes of map (or more) at a time, paying $25 (or more) up front,
then download the USGS quadrangles of your choice. As an example,
the Cascade Pass quadrangle lists at 4.27 mb, so it would cost 71
cents, if you buy enough other maps to exhaust the required down payment.
The principal advantage of this site seems to be that they make a
lot available: all USGS maps and not a few foreign maps as well. Maps
are TIFF (Tagged-Image File Format).
- Again, for those
who enjoy paying for what they get, http://mapmart.com/
offers all the USGS quadrangles for download, apparently at three
dollars apiece with a minimum order of fifteen dollars. Files are
said to be GeoTIFF, a TIFF variation that most image viewers will
handle with aplomb.
- For the state
of Washington, you can get any quadrangle free from the University
of Washington. One starting place is http://duff.geology.washington.edu/data/watiles/index.html
. On the Washington state map, click on the large (one by two degree)
quadrangle covering your region. For example, for Mt. Rainier you’d
select “Yakima”. From the menu of choices, select “Digital
Raster Graphics”, a sesquipedalianism meaning nothing more than
a scanned image of a map. If you want your map collarless (for easy
software gluing to adjacent maps), select instead the clipped DRGs.
On the succeeding screen map displaying a grid of 128 quadrangles
by name, simply click on the one you want to begin the downloading.
Maps are ZIPped TIFF; that is, you’ll need unZIPping and TIFF
image-viewing software to see them, but few computers are sold nowadays
without such. If your network access is narrow of band, allow time
for the data transfer, perhaps a quarter of an hour or so.
If you want to surf the Web yourself for more map goodies, a keyword
to enter into a search engine is “DRG”. If you browse the
aforementioned commercial sites, you’ll find they offer interesting
variations on our theme, such as custom mosaicked (stitched together)
maps and maps delivered on CD-ROM.
Information provided
by Bill Fortney - thanks Bill!
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