Park Maps - Downloadable?

[+Team Teague]

My husband and I were out caching today and were talking about how great it would be if park trails were on our GPS.... Does anyone know of a way to download park trail maps onto our GPS'?

 

I was thinking how awesome it would be for state parks to offer that on their websites!

[+KG1960]

You're right - that would be awesome!! However, I just looked at the Illinois DNR web site and viewed some of the maps they have for some of the state parks that I am familiar with. The maps, which you can view on your computer and download to print, seem too general or too large a scale to be of much use with a GPS. The error might be extreme at small scales. Plus, they seem to show just the main trails and not the smaller side trails. So, I'm guessing that more detailed trail maps don't exist. Also, I would assume that each brand of GPS has their own proprietary map format. Although, it would be great if one could get such maps into one's GPS.

Edited November 5, 2007 by KG1960

[+Alan2]

If you buy one of the National Geographic 24k state series maps, you can use their MapXchange. What this is people have walked trail and post the route with all the waypoints on the NG web page. You the downlown the routes "free" and load them into you GPS or onto the NG map on your computer. You can then overlay the waypoints and transfer or print out the maps with all the rioute and waypoints. Very neat!!

[+The Herd]

State GIS layers often have trails also. Indiana has a state trail layer that you can add to GIS. It looks very accurate to me.