National Geographic Topo States For Illinois ?

[+Rocketcaver]

Does anyone know if the NG Topo States for Illinois software shows the trails in the Shawnee National Forest?

If not, do you know of anything that does?

I do some geocaching & hiking in that area and thought this might be helpfull.

I have the Garmin Topo 24k package but trail coverage is spotty at best.

Thanks for any help.

[+Indotguy]

Does anyone know if the NG Topo States for Illinois software shows the trails in the Shawnee National Forest?

If not, do you know of anything that does?

I do some geocaching & hiking in that area and thought this might be helpfull.

I have the Garmin Topo 24k package but trail coverage is spotty at best.

Thanks for any help.

 

I'm not familiar with the National Geographic topo series but I would not expect any commercially available topo maps to show many hiking trails. Erosion and other factors require trails to be re-routed fairly often and therefore the mapping data would tend to become inaccurate fairly quickly.

[bgarland]

I don't know about Illinois but I have the National Geographic State Topo maps for Arizona and they have a lot more trail detail than the less detailed Garmin Topo maps. Not perfect, but pretty darn close. :-)

[+myotis]

I was going to look into that, but forgot about it. But I will now. The Forest Service has GPSed most of the trails or many of them in Shawnee. They have them in Archview Files. They had sent me a file a year ir so ago. Now that I know how to make Garmin maps, I tried making a map out of it. It took about 5 minutes to make a transparent trail map (but I may have used the wrong datum. I need to check on that). The way they work is they will overlay on the other maps. So you can use the 24K topo and they will show up. In mapsource, all you see is the trail. I will check with the forest service Monday and see what kind of data they have. Once I get the most up to date data, I will create a garmin map of the trails in Shawnee and upload it at http://mapcenter.cgpsmapper.com/

[+Rocketcaver]

I was going to look into that, but forgot about it. But I will now. The Forest Service has GPSed most of the trails or many of them in Shawnee. They have them in Archview Files. They had sent me a file a year ir so ago. Now that I know how to make Garmin maps, I tried making a map out of it. It took about 5 minutes to make a transparent trail map (but I may have used the wrong datum. I need to check on that). The way they work is they will overlay on the other maps. So you can use the 24K topo and they will show up. In mapsource, all you see is the trail. I will check with the forest service Monday and see what kind of data they have. Once I get the most up to date data, I will create a garmin map of the trails in Shawnee and upload it at http://mapcenter.cgpsmapper.com/

 

That would be great Myotis, thanks.

Would that by any chance include the River to River trail?

By the way, I emailed the folks at National Geographic with my question and they replied that their product is a straight scan of the USGS maps, so any trails included are just what the USGS put there.

Pity they didn't scan the forest service maps.

Les