My feature rich backcountry mapping site.

[spelt with a t]

I just wanted to say I've been spending a lot of time with the site the past few days and the side-by-side feature is really speeding up my learning curve. I have a tiny bit of experience working with topo maps, but not enough to use them quickly and confidently. Comparing ArcGIS with aerial and satellite views is helping so much.

[John West]

Very very cool. Bookmarked, look forward to trying it out later tonight.

[Ryan Bressler]

For those of you looking to seek out deep powder…or plan hikes that avoid it…I just added the National Snow Analyses done by the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center of the United States National Weather Service to hillmap.com. This provides a ton of data about the snow pack across the entire US and parts of Canada and is updated daily.

Current Snow depth for the cascades:
http://www.hillmap.com/m/agtzbG9wZW1hcHBlcnIQCxIIU2F2ZWRNYXAYmdcKDA

Snow precipitation yesterday:
http://www.hillmap.com/m/agtzbG9wZW1hcHBlcnIQCxIIU2F2ZWRNYXAYjYkKDA

I've also added weather radar and snotel sites and updated the hillmap UI since I last posted and repurposed my old climbing blog to become a kind of hillmap blog/changlog at blog.hillmap.com.

I hope some of you find this all useful and, as always, let me know if anything breaks.

edit: clicky links…i hope.

[Terry G]

I used the heck out of your site over the summer. It is great, and I will never have to struggle with NG TOPO! ui again.

Thanks for the great work. I am looking forward to checking out your changes.

Terry

[Jerry Adams]

Top link – nice – I like the map you overlay the snow data on – I use that in the winter to plan hikes that avoid the serious snow – not always totally accurate but gives a good idea

Bottom link – doesn't download?

[Ryan Bressler]

Hmmm…all the links work for me but the files are big and can take a bit. If you keep having problems drop me an email through the link on the site or pm on here and let me know what browser and operating system you are using and I'll see if I can fix it.

[Eric Lundquist]

You have an excellent site and my go to for most of my planning. Even though I have the National Geo software for my region, your site is much more user friendly.

A few questions:
1.) Is there a way you could include the information from closedcontour.com as a layer in addition to MyTopo?
2.) Can you integrate the path tool with an existing googlemap?

[Ryan Bressler]

1) Re: closedcontours.com. Those topos are super nice but it doesn't look like he offers an api and I would feel bad stealing his work and server time. The maps also seem to only cover part of the sierra and it looks like they use a different projection then I do.

I am working on producing and serving my own modernized map layers in a couple of different ways but I plan on doing it for most of the country at once (I write software to process tremendous amounts of cancer data on server farms as my day job so it seems natural to tackle the big data problem)…currently I that project is stalled while I have terabytes of data shipped to me on harddrives but I hope to have something up by next spring.

2) Re path tool integration. Path importing is next on my list of things to do while I wait on the above data and this will allow you to use paths grom your gps (via gpx) or exsisting google maps via kml.

[Jerry Adams]

Tried again, now works, thanks…

[Brendan Swihart]

Awesome new features. Any chance of adding UTM grids in the future?

Thanks for the great site and I love that you keep working to make it better.

[Ryan Bressler]

UTM will happen at some point soon…I couldn't find an open source library that did it so I need to sit down, learn about the system and write something.

I've been focussing on getting a few snow related features out (any backcountry skiers/avi aware folks should check out the slope angle overlays I just added to the data tabs) in time for winter.

[Author]

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