Section
USGS quads, modern GPX, route planning for shoulder-season walks, the cartographers still drawing by hand.
Maps & Routes
Between the snow and the midges, the Cairngorms offer a narrow window each May for long walks on the high plateau. Planning a route for that window means reading the maps for ground that the maps do not quite describe.
Maps & Routes
Wildfire perimeter maps look definitive on the page. The cartographers who make them know they are provisional documents, drawn in conditions that change faster than the ink can dry.
Maps & Routes
The GPX file format has, in twenty years, become the universal currency of digital route sharing. It also flattens the experience of a route into a thin sequence of points that omits most of what a good route description would carry.
Maps & Routes
Across the United States, the practical maps that hikers carry are not made by the government. They are made by trail associations, mostly by volunteers, often by retirees with cartography software and a willingness to argue about line weights.
Maps & Routes
In a converted barn outside Brunswick, Maine, a sixty-one-year-old man draws topographic maps by hand for clients who still pay for them. He is, by his own reckoning, the last full-time commercial cartographer working in the state.
Maps & Routes
Among navigation techniques taught at British outdoor centres, the ridgeline handrail is one of the simplest and the most consistently misunderstood. Used well, it removes most of the decisions that get walkers lost.
Maps & Routes
The Bob Marshall Wilderness has no roads, no marked trails on its inner ridges, and few reliable water sources after July. A four-day route through the western end requires real planning, in pencil, before anyone laces a boot.
Maps & Routes
A small program inside the USGS keeps the 7.5-minute topographic series honest. In 2026 it relies on roughly four hundred volunteers who walk their own quad once a year and send back red ink.