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40-Foot Contours:
Above the Timber's Washington Topos are
at integer 40-foot intervals, the same as standard 7.5-minute USGS Quad
maps.
High Resolution
Water Data:
No surprise to residents of Washington,
the "W" stands for water. Virtually every Washington river is
represented by a bank-to-bank extent, not just a simple line. This
bank-to-bank extent also applies to a significant number of creeks. Each
bank-to-bank extent had to be manually selected and the feature name
applied. Their were hundreds-of-thousands of these areas to select.
Added to the river and streams is the fact that Washington has hundreds
of miles of ocean shore. All-in-all, converting the high resolution
water dataset into GPS maps was 85% of the total project.
Without this high resolution water data, no GPS topo map
can lay claim to being a 24K equivalent map.
15-minute Coverage
per Map:
Each map segment covers an area of 15 x
15 minutes of arc or exactly 4 - 7.5 minute Quad Maps. These maps
seamlessly* join one to another, therefore you can have the entire
state as one seamless map inside your GPS receiver. Their
are in total 380 - 15-min map, which is equivalent to 1520 - 7.5 minute
quads.
When a 15-minute segment covers
Washington and an adjoining state, the Washington portion is complete.
The adjoining state portion of the segment may/not be complete.
*At integer degrees N-S,
their exists an E-W seam in contours only. The free trial download
bridges this seam so you can visually determine the magnitude.
Covers ALL
of Washington:
Entire state Coverage.
Extensive
Geologic and General Feature Points:
In addition to the expected summits;
mines, cemeteries, arches, pillars, basins, springs, flats, ridges,
cliffs and passes are shown. In all just shy of 32,000 POI's are
included, simply mind numbing.
Forest Service Trails:
Washington's National Forests are
crisscrossed with numerous foot trails, aiding backcountry travel. If
they were in the Forest Service database, they're on these maps. Trails
are shown in a double wide dashed red line to aid visibility. Garmin's
standard in single wide dashed black, making trails almost invisible,
see Mapsource screenshots below for an example.
BTS and Last Mile Forest
Service Roads:
Their are 600,000+ lines describing every
normal road in this map set, each described in a unique manner by each
hosting county to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics. As such one
vector is labeled Baker Highway and next State Hwy 542, "same road!" Not
only different names but different road classifications, hence different
line types. The good news, the roads are here and if you stop and let
your GPS catch-up (see
Disadvantages), it will nicely position you in 2D
space.
Added to the 600K BTS roads are roughly
39,000 last-mile Forest Service roads which extend past the BTS
database. Each had to be manually selected to prevent conflicting lines
from different databases. I'd call these logging roads, but in any case
they're all shown as a double wide dashed black line and labeled dirt
road.
Federal Land Areas:
Included in the Washington maps are all
Federal Land Areas: Parks, Forest, BLM, Wilderness, Wildlife, Military,
DOE, and Indian Reservations. Each uses one of four colors/patterns and when you
position the cursor in an open area, the exact name of the area will be
displayed. Your GPS will not display the same patterns and colors as
Mapsource, see screenshots above for an example. In the federal database, many national parks are designated
as wilderness and are shown as wilderness.
Two identical screenshots comparing the
24K Topos with Garmin's Topo West. Of note are the three distinct area
types: Military, Forest and Wilderness, the trail is shown in red, the
stream has a proper name and the glacier is shown in color verses a
hash. These characteristics would be typical throughout the state.
Free Trial Download:
Here's a 4 MB test file which is a cluster of 4 - 15-min map
segments which includes glaciers and ocean. They're in a
self-extracting executable file. The map files will appear in Mapsource as
"Wash Topo Demo" and you
can load them into any Garmin mapping GPS using Mapsource. If you're new to Mapsource,
these
screenshots will help immensely.
Download:
Wash
Topo Demo
Caution: You MUST have Mapsource 6.0 or later installed before running
this executable.
Cost:
For the cost of a dozen
paper 7.5-minute USGS Quads, you can buy this map set with the same
detail and coverage
as 1520 Quads. That's less than $0.06 per Quad equivalent.
More Screenshots:
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