topo maps of the Buffalo

[Al Agnew]

1 hour ago, bfishn said:

You can get free downloads of USGS topos from their Historical Topo collection at;

http://nationalmap.gov/historical/

Your area of interest hasn't changed much in the last few decades, so maps from the '80s-90s should serve your purpose.

Wow...if I'm reading things right, it looks like you can actually download free versions of the very latest USGS quadrangles from the USGS map store as long as you have the necessary software...in layered files where you can hide or show layers, so you could hide everything but the contour lines, or show lots of stuff that's not on the typical printed map. As a map freak, I can see that I'm going to be exploring this stuff in the very near future. And the historical maps are going to be interesting, too. Thanks for turning me on to this...I hadn't been keeping up with all the latest from the USGS.

[Al Agnew]

I played around with the USGS site, and yes, you can download high quality topo maps for free. Of course, you need a large format printer to print a whole map, but there's a feature where you can print the full size map on 9 sheets of 8.5 X 11 inch paper and then piece them together. The downloaded files come as zip files, and you have to unzip them to use them...since I'm not the most computer savvy person on earth, it took me a while to figure out how to unzip them. They will then open in one of the newest versions of Adobe Acrobat Reader, and on it there are a bunch of different cool tools. The files are layered, with each feature (topo lines, water features, roads and streets, woodlands, etc.) all in different layers, and you can hide layers to customize your map. 

These are the newest versions of each map, and the first digital versions. One thing I noticed was that the contour lines aren't quite as detailed as on some of the most recent versions of the paper maps. On them, you could often read just how high a sheer cliff face was (if it's sheer, the lines merge into a single line, and you count the number of lines merging to give you the hieght of a sheer cliff). On the new ones, a steep hillside and a cliff along the river are impossible to distinguish because in both cases the lines are just crowded very close together.

Another neat feature, though, is that the "orthoquad", which is the satellite or aerial photo used to make the map or at least covering the map, is included as another layer, and you can overlap it onto the map.

They furnish a good set of instructions on how to do everything that is a 19 page PDF file.

[bfishn]

Yeah, the new ones have some cool features like the layers and coordinate displays, but since they're simply auto-generated from the national GIS database they lack some detail, particularly in the high relief areas you noticed. The historical collection lacks all the new toys, as they are just scans of the older paper maps that were created from aerial photos, but they're a little better in high-relief detail.

Unzipping the compressed file downloads is just a right click on the zipped folder, then select "Extract all". :-)

[holleybob]

AL, you are officially a bona-fide map geek.