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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 maps, 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.
Massive Trail Network:
The Washington maps contain merged trails
from three different datasets. If you compare Above the Timber's trails
to any other Topo map you will find these to be the most detailed and
complete. Trails
are shown in a double wide dashed red line to aid visibility. Trails
also appear in 3 of the four zoom levels for ease of trip planning.
Roads:
The version 2 maps make use of the Census
Bureaus 2008 dataset instead of the outdated BTS data. Most US highways
and many state highways show number shields for rapid recognition. Added to the
paved roads are roughly
39,000 last-mile Forest Service roads which are shown as a dashed black
line and designated Dirt/4WD.
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 and Upgrade:
For the cost of a half-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 $0.04 per Quad equivalent.
The upgrade options will
differ depending on whether you downloaded or bought retail, here's the
Upgrade Link.
More Screenshots:
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