Help with Trail Maps for GPS

What maps are you using for your GPS? I was looking at the Garmin site and I see they have a CD-ROM avail (but no MicroSD card???) that covers the trails in the whites and a few other regions but I see it didn't cover the Catskills. I was wondering what those of you who use GPS were using. I'm new to the GPS thing and am just learning. I've always been a solid map & compass guy, but the times they are a changin!

I bought a Garmin GPS this summer at Cabelas. They didn't have any with the maps loaded in store, so I bought the 24K maps online (same price as if they had a GPS with 100K installed) through the Garmin website. Got the "Northeast" region and have been happy with them so far. It would seem so far that most/all the normal trails are in the map. They are pretty close, but don't always line up exactly with the track the GPS is logging.

I got mine sent to me on microSD card, but you can download them too.

Link to product on Garmin's site

My suggestions re Garmin maps:
* You get a lot more map coverage for your dollar if you buy them on DVD rather than microSD card. (Haven't checked out download coverage vs price.)
* Get US topo 100K DVD and or regional 24K topo (eg Northeast--6 separate DVDs to cover the conUS) These maps are unlocked.
* Read the fine print before buying: some maps are locked to the microSD card, some to the GPS, and some are unlocked.

Free topo maps are available at http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/ but, IMO, they aren't as good as the Garmin maps. There are also some useful tutorials.

This topic has been covered in more detail in previous threads.

Doug

Does that one have trails pre-loaded on it? Or do you have to set waypoints? TX

BISCUT said:

Does that one have trails pre-loaded on it? Or do you have to set waypoints? TX

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Garmin's preloaded GPSes come with US topo 100K maps.

The trails are from USGS topos and may not be very accurate. No preset waypoints. If you want accurate trails, use the USFS WMNF tracks that I referenced in a recent prior thread.

Doug

DougPaul said:

Garmin's preloaded GPSes come with US topo 100K maps.

The trails are from USGS topos and may not be very accurate. No preset waypoints. If you want accurate trails, use the USFS WMNF tracks that I referenced in a recent prior thread.

Doug

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As far as I know, you CANNOT buy GPS maps with decent hiking trail information for the WNNF. In fact, my experience w/DeLorme is that the 'paid' maps are vastly inferior to the pre-loaded maps. USGS topos are way out-of-date, and in many cases, only ever displayed "wishful thinking" for trail location anyway.

But you can load the official WMNF gpx tracks for all the trails for FREE on any GPS. The only problem I've noticed is that trails that are inside NH State Parks but completely *outside* the WMNF (ex: Dodge Cutoff, Saco River Trail) don't show up in the WMNF database. Trails that are partly inside the forest show up in their entirety, so there are only a small number that are "missing".

JCarter said:

As far as I know, you CANNOT buy GPS maps with decent hiking trail information for the WNNF. In fact, my experience w/DeLorme is that the 'paid' maps are vastly inferior to the pre-loaded maps. USGS topos are way out-of-date, and in many cases, only ever displayed "wishful thinking" for trail location anyway.

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The commercial maps are made by companies that need to make a profit and I doubt that precisely surveying trails will add to their bottom lines. And while individual hikers can focus on their favorite areas, a mapping company would have to consider all trails within the boundaries of their maps.

USGS trails are both dated and often involved a significant amount of guesswork if they couldn't be seen in aerial photographs. (USGS topo maps were generated from aerial photographs.) The trails were often inaccurate but nobody knew the difference because they had no way of knowing exactly where they were. Consumer GPSes now allow hikers to locate themselves to higher accuracy than their maps. Get used to it. The non-GPS traditional methods of navigation still work as well as ever.

A number of commercial (including the early DeLorme) and free amateur topo maps were generated from SARSAT DEM data resulting in poorer quality maps than maps based on the USGS topos. The DEM data does not include trails at all.

But you can load the official WMNF gpx tracks for all the trails for FREE on any GPS. The only problem I've noticed is that trails that are inside NH State Parks but completely *outside* the WMNF (ex: Dodge Cutoff, Saco River Trail) don't show up in the WMNF database. Trails that are partly inside the forest show up in their entirety, so there are only a small number that are "missing".

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Some of the tracks within the WMNF aren't very accurate--see the discussion in the original announcement thread.

Doug

DougPaul said:

Free topo maps are available at http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/ but, IMO, they aren't as good as the Garmin maps. There are also some useful tutorials.

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I'll put in a vote for the GPSFileDepot maps. I've been using them on my garmin etrex for four years, and I have no complaints. I've never tried garmin's paid maps because the free maps are good enough that I can't justify spending a large amount of cash on something that doesn't need improvement. The lack of hiking trails on the GPS maps isn't a difficult issue to overcome-- I always hike with a set of paper maps as well, and I can usually get a good approximation of my location on the trail by comparing map features from the GPS to the map, or plotting the coordinates from the GPS to the grid on the map.

Guthook said:

I'll put in a vote for the GPSFileDepot maps. I've been using them on my garmin etrex for four years, and I have no complaints. I've never tried garmin's paid maps because the free maps are good enough that I can't justify spending a large amount of cash on something that doesn't need improvement. The lack of hiking trails on the GPS maps isn't a difficult issue to overcome-- I always hike with a set of paper maps as well, and I can usually get a good approximation of my location on the trail by comparing map features from the GPS to the map, or plotting the coordinates from the GPS to the grid on the map.

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+1, with the caveat that you can always add the tracks for the trail(s) you will be using, or those in the area, up to 20. I have multiple tracks for the 4K popular loops. They overlay quite nicely with the official trail tracks.

Tim

DougPaul said:

Some of the tracks within the WMNF aren't very accurate--see the discussion in the original announcement thread.
Doug

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Agreed. Though the "digitized off a map" trails vs. the "trackfile from a GPS" are usually easy to recognize when you display them. The "digitized" ones are too smooth, and line up with the lines on the underlying topos too well.

Guthook said:

I'll put in a vote for the GPSFileDepot maps. I've been using them on my garmin etrex for four years, and I have no complaints. I've never tried garmin's paid maps because the free maps are good enough that I can't justify spending a large amount of cash on something that doesn't need improvement. The lack of hiking trails on the GPS maps isn't a difficult issue to overcome-- I always hike with a set of paper maps as well, and I can usually get a good approximation of my location on the trail by comparing map features from the GPS to the map, or plotting the coordinates from the GPS to the grid on the map.

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Agreed. I've felt zero need to go beyond the set of maps I downloaded several years ago off that site. As for trails, check out "My Trails" on the same site. It is a transparent map layer that you can overlay over whatever base topos you run, versus having a set of GPX tracks to turn on and off (like Tim, I have plenty of those of my own now for the 4Ks). It doesn't have everything, but the coverage in the Whites is fairly good especially on the more popular trails, and in my experience most of the trails it shows are pretty accurate as many of them were generated from recorded tracks sent to the author. On those, the only major deviations I have found correspond to relatively recent reroutes. A subset of the tracks in that set were generated by tracing the trails shown on USGS topos (see JCarter's comment above mine, it sounds like the same concept), and thus can be radically off, but I've actually only found a few of those in practice (the Monroe Trail on Camel's Hump is one).

Thanks for the solid info guys. I have a lot of learning to do with this matter!

madmattd said:

As for trails, check out "My Trails" on the same site. It is a transparent map layer that you can overlay over whatever base topos you run, versus having a set of GPX tracks to turn on and off (like Tim, I have plenty of those of my own now for the 4Ks). It doesn't have everything, but the coverage in the Whites is fairly good especially on the more popular trails, and in my experience most of the trails it shows are pretty accurate as many of them were generated from recorded tracks sent to the author.

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Definitely and emphatically agree. Transparent maps are a wonderful and apparently not widely known component of the Garmin maps.

I suspect that their NH coverage comes basically from the WMNF data, though over the last year or so several hikers have contributed many tracks south of the WMNF. Let me encourage you to contribute any tracks that you have that are missing!

[Added]
My Trails-High Quality Trail and POI Maps Map
[/Added]

Hey, thanks for making me look again Mohamed, my version of My Trails is apparently WAY out of date (2009 iirc). I thought I had looked a while back and didn't see an updated version, but your link shows that I was clearly wrong! Time to get the new version, I bet there are a lot more trails in it now that I was missing!