Camping Tips

[xoxoxoBruce]

Good evening Mr. and Mrs. America, from border to border and coast to coast and all the ships at sea. There's good news tonight!

National Geographic has built an easy to use web interface that allows anyone to quickly find any 7.5 minute topo in the continental U.S.A. for downloading and printing. Each topo has been pre-processed to print on a standard home, letter size printer. These are the same topos that were printed by USGS for decades on giant bus-sized presses but are now available in multi-page PDFs that can be printed just about anywhere. They are pre-packaged using the standard 7.5 minute, 1:24,000 base but with some twists:

Page 1 is an overview map showing the topo in context
Pages 2 through 5 are the standard USGS topo cut in quarters to fit on standard printers
Hillshading has been added to each page of the PDF to help visualize the topography.

http://www.natgeomaps.com/trail-maps/pdf-quads

Since now National Geographic is in bed with FOX, these were probably intended for the survivalists in Idaho, but you can get them too. Of course the NSA will probably monitor your downloads so get extras scattered around the country to mind fuck them.