Bicycle Travel > Gear Talk
Backroads maps of the US.
chappers:
Hi all,
I just had a quick look on amazon and came up with Benchmark Maps & Atlases. look good...but what do you use?
now, i want a map that shows all roads. right down to the very minor or the dirt / gravel. (I will be riding across Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming, South Dakota, Minnesota/Iowa...etc...to back here in Ontario, Canada).
where i can, i will be following Adventure Cycling maps. but i want some excellent "off the highway" experiences.
I will be using paper maps, not GPS!
What can you recommend??
Many thanks,
Chris.
Fred Hiltz:
That's a tough set of restrictions to follow, Chris. Paper maps of all roads exist, but I doubt a bicycle could carry a complete set for those states. The Benchmark atlases certainly do not fill the bill. Take a look at the sample landscape map in http://www.benchmarkmaps.com/products-page/atlases/oregonroad-recreation-atlas, examining the roads around Joseph, OR. Then call up Joseph in Google Maps. When zoomed in, Google Maps shows most of the roads, typically what you would get on paper from the USGS 1:24000 topographic maps.
Now we are talking all Perhaps you will have a chance to resupply along the way, keeping map weight down to 20 pounds or so.
Consider the scale of these maps, typically 2000 feet/inch. On a through highway, you will ride from one edge to another in a few minutes, then need to change maps.
The better way is to slip a smart phone into your pocket, get the Google Maps app, and go anywhere in the civilized world. What do you have against GPS?
Fred
chappers:
ok, maybe i shouldn't have said all the roads!! but here, i have paper maps of, for example, eastern Ontario and it shows pretty much most things - certainly to a scale where there are very few cars.
these maps are paper, fold out style, and not in a book so very easy to carry.
do they exist for the US states mentioned? then i can be selective, and carry only "south western South Dakota" for example.
not GPS - battery life, time between charges, miss the opportunity to go the wrong way and meet some great people for example?
i would also consider taking my own atlas of the route - ie. take apart the Benchmark maps and build a new one. do Benchmark maps show a suitable scale to ride on (I have never ridden in the US, so don't know).
Thanks for your reply.
Chris.
staehpj1:
Delorme Gazeteer maps are great for small road detail. I love them for finding remote whitewater kayaking put-ins, backpacking trail heads, and stuff like that.
That said I don't tend to want to find all the tiny roads myself so I do not use them for touring. State road maps are typically about the level of detail I prefer when not using AC maps. If you want every little road paved or not the Gazetteers are great though.
pdlamb:
It sounds like OP is looking for something like the old USGS quad maps. As Fred noted, these cover a fairly small area (about 4x7 miles, IIRC). I assume they're all still available, although most hiking stores only carry a small selection.
USGS used to have (and may still offer) 1:250000 or 1:200000 area maps. These don't have all the detail of the 1:24000 quads, but they were often useful for locating areas of interest where we'd zoom in and get the smaller scale maps. Even so, a smaller state like Tennessee took about nine maps to get full coverage.
It might be worth getting something like the DeLorme North America Topo program to look at the states you're interested in. IIRC, they still have references to the smaller 1:24000 quads, so you could browse over the winter and identify which small scale maps to buy in the spring.
I don't know, but does anybody offer topo maps for a tablet computer? That would be just about perfect -- small enough to carry, and a large enough display to read the maps.
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