[pct-l] National Geographic replacement for halfmile maps

[Peter Stevenson]

I have been using a set of Halfmile's maps I printed a few years ago.
Sorry to hear they are no longer being kept up.

On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 7:22 PM Town Food <pctl at marcusschwartz.com> wrote:

> It looks like archive.org still has the old trail notes and maps.  You
> may need to try a variety of dates to get all the files, but I saw at
> least some of the 2019 trail notes are available from a November 28th
> snapshot of the site at:
>
> https://web.archive.org/web/20191128224409/https://www.pctmap.net/trail-notes/
>
>   -=Town Food
>
> On 7/10/20 5:34 PM, David Hough reading PCT-L wrote:
> >
> > I planned some dayhiking in sections P, Q, and R, and noticed National
> > Geographic map booklet 1006 at my REI, so I bought one to see how it
> > compared with the halfmile maps it superseded.
> >
> > First the good news - smaller, lighter, more compact,
> > less likely to fall out of your pocket,
> > less likely to blow away if it does fall.
> > The contour lines seem to be consistent across the trail - no metric
> contours.
> >
> > Much more surrounding territory shown - which can be helpful if you are
> > trying to follow obscure Forest Service roads to remote trailheads to
> > do short dayhikes.     Of course, all maps of Forest Service roads tend
> > to be misleading, especially for those of us who are easily misled,
> especially
> > in deep canyons where GPS is unreliable.     It's worse in the Klamath
> NF,
> > where all the high altitude road markers tend to be vandalized or
> weatherized
> > into illegibility.
> >
> > Now the bad news - there's a big difference between 1:75000 and 1:31680.
> > The type size on the new maps is barely legible with elderly eyes.   The
> > contour lines are too thick and it's very hard to discern small
> potential bivy
> > spots on saddles, for instance.      There is no running legend of
> waypoints
> > on this map as there was on each halfmile sheet.     My conclusion was
> that
> > the new maps are mainly useful for planning and as a backup in case you
> > drop your smart phone in a creek -
> > where perhaps you kept the maps you actually navigated by.
> > The trail notes now on pctmap.net are keyed to the National Geographic
> map
> > booklets, and so harder to use with the previous maps.
> >
> > If I had understood what was coming, I would have downloaded the last
> > complete consistent set of halfmile maps, tracks, waypoints, and trail
> notes.
> > I'd be willing to pay National Geographic for that now - or the PCTA
> > or halfmile - whoever owns the IP.
> >
> > I do have a fairly recent (2018?) set of printed halfmile maps from Yogi,
> > that I will have to be careful with.     After she quit selling them,
> > I bought an hp452 color printer which does a pretty good job of printing
> > out halfmile maps that I had downloaded the pdf for.
> >
> > Unfortunately the trail notes
> > that I have were printed out at various times and aren't necessarily
> > consistent with the maps.
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