Has anybody used the Fugawi software? I want similar quality to the 1:50,000 maps I can purchase at MEC. And the ability to select and print my area of interest.

I visited the website and it reads to me like a viewer is included in the $100 price. Does anybody out there have this? I'm wondering if it allows me to stitch maps together and print my area of interest (i hate it when the area I want to got to is at the edge of two maps). The Fugawi web site has a demo version of the advanced viewer for download. I guess what I am wondering is if the basic viewer will do what I want...I don't really need all the fancy GPS stuff in the advanced software.

The 1:50,000 maps are notoriously inaccurate. The TRIM data from the BC Basemaps are much more up-to-date/

A website I use to generate BIG maps of areas of interest is trail.brijn.nu. It extracts BC Basemap data and overlays it with GPS UTM grids in NAD83 format.

Only problem - no placenames or placenames are very small

Some examples of maps I've created are here. I marked up all the placenames myself with Photoshop Elements:

http://www.leelau.net/ns.htm

The BC Basemap access has changed significantly.

The portal is now through a federal website:
http://www.nric.ca/

The basemap data is now called "iMap BC".

Once you get to the actual basemap, it's mostly the same, but it is harder to find a link to turn the contours on. It took me a couple of minutes to figure out how to do it. You have to add basemap layers because contours are not in the options provided in the layers that are already turned on.

At least for now, the good old basemap is still available with the direct link: http://maps.gov.bc.ca/imf50/imf.jsp?site=bc_basemap

There is another interface at http://openmaps.gov.bc.ca/
This is similar to the one G-spotter mentions, but it seems easier to get contours and less clutter. Unfortunately it doesn't seem to want to show contours on glaciated regions.

In other mapping news, I recently discovered that you can download, for free, any Canadian 1:50k or 1:250k topo from Natural Resources Canada's GeoGratis website. The map images are in TIFF format and include geospatial data. They can be viewed with any imaging software that supports TIFF, or they can be imported into mapping/GPS software packages like OziExplorer or Fugawi.

I'm not sure how long this has been available, but it means you no longer need to buy maps from Etopo or Fugawi.

Google Earth just improved resolution for the Duffy area. For example you can now see Keith's hut