Visitor maps – the nice brochures they give you at park entrances or the giant Forest Service road maps with nary a topo line on them – aren’t terribly useful for backcountry navigation. However they can be great for visualizing roads and trails at a 10,000′ view and then switching over to other layers as […]
Without much fanfare, the Forest Service recently redid its 7.5 minute quads. The previous version, on CalTopo until now, was called the Primary Base Series. They were produced “back in the day”, offset printed, and then scanned into TIFF files. They had roads and trails that were lacking on USGS maps, and perhaps just as […]
While rendering the new slope shading layers, I also rendered data tiles for elevation, slope and aspect. CalTopo can now use these to create custom shading for the continental US. Want to color all north facing aspects above 7000′ and steeper than 32 degrees blue? Create an elevation relief map? No problem. Unfortunately I haven’t […]
The CalTopo slope shading layer, originally done as an experiment of sorts, is overdue for a makeover. From a usability perspective, there are not enough colors – a wide variety of terrain gets lumped together into a few categories. From a technical perspective, tiles are rendered on the fly using Mapnik and prebuilt polygons. Not […]
Newer Garmin GPSs (including the 62, Oregon, Colorado and Montana series) allow you to use KMZ (Google Earth) files as custom map layers. You can now export CalTopo’s map layers and use them with these devices. Go to http://caltopo.com/kmz.html or click Print and then choose KMZ. Navigate to the area you want to export Set the […]
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