Topo software?

[mycoatl]

Anyone use this stuff? Worth the $? How 'bout the special paper?

[selkirk]

I've got the Washington State one and use it all the time. It kind of eats up ink, but it means custom maps for each trip and no trips to REI to pick up theirs. Haven't used the special paper though, I always just ziplock mine.

[bobinc]

It's typically $100/state. Right now, I've seen it online for $70/state but if you are worried about GPS compatibility, make sure it's the right version. DK about special paper; we just use contact sheets over regular paper.

[Blakej]

The cool thing I like about it is it enables you to sit at your computer and just brouse through the maps and just scheme up new trips. It also gives you the ablilty to get a good estimate on distances and elevation gain/loss plus will show you the grade % for different areas of your route among many other helpful attributes. Well worth the money.

[nalo]

w ait, I'm confused... who actually buys software? Don't you know it's free on the internet?

[forrest_m]

did you see this recent thread where we discussed the free topo & aerial photo software available to make your life easier and more efficient?

[Blakej]

damn, well atleast I wasn't the one who payed for it.

[marylou]

The paper is nice, but expensive. The kind that NG sells is printable on both sides.

[DeerRidgeBoy]

I use National Geographic Topo! state software and it works great. It's easy to trace out routes for a quick elevation review or to print on a map, it's easy to load waypoints to and from my Garmin (serial) GPS, and it's especially easy to print the maps I want, at the scale I want, without stitching together TIFF files or screen snapshots. It also allows me to easily save sketched trails, notes, and other stuff for reference on future trips. I've found that NG's topo maps are often more recent than the topo maps on the free sites (15 years newer in some cases). Whether it's worth $75/state depends on what your time and effort is worth, I guess. I use free stuff too, but mostly for states I don't have in NG Topo!.

I bought DeLorme Topo USA 5.0 and hated it. You can plot contours as tight as you like, but it doesn't avoid the fact that the underlying x-y grid is spaced too far to be useful at field scales. Cliffs look like smooth hills, that kind of thing. It's good enough for driving to the trailhead, but past that...it's not something I'd use even for hiking. DeLorme has a higher-resolution topo product, but it's about as expensive as NG Topo! and it appears to have the same DOS-like user interface. Yuk.

The NG Adventure Paper works as advertised. It's made of Teslin, and the ink is permanent and waterproof. I normally print my maps on plain paper and keep them in a plastic sheet cover because it can be hard keeping a half-dozen sheets of paper from scattering anyway. But I've printed maps for some hikes I do often, and even after being folded in quarters and stuffed into my sweaty pocket for a dozen trips, they still look great. I just rinse the mud off afterwards. As far as paper quality, it makes a print that's as sharp as regular paper.

Here's a map I made with NG Topo! state. 2.5MB PDF.

http://www.lava.net/~dfrick/misc/HonoluluMauka.pdf