What are your favorite tool/software/website s for planning a backpacking trip

Without a doubt Google Earth. The 3D touring and satellite imagery are very useful, especially for off-trail route planning. The ability to see if terrain is talus, rock slabs, grassy, scree, marshy, or full of dead fall is priceless. And you can create custom .kmz files with routes and way points and send to friends (almost everyone has Google Earth on their computer).

A useful tool for photography is the “Street view” in Google Earth, to get an idea of what the foreground and background lines look like for a given composition. For example, you can see if a summit will likely be obscured by an intermediate ridge line or not. You can also see if a lake shore is able to reflect a specific peak or other background element.

Lester,

Agreed! I have only being using Google Earth for about 4 days now and I keep finding great features in it. The Sawtooths as you already know don’t have a lot of information and there is going to be some off trail travel. Google earth has been super helpful. I like it that I can also look at maps back through time all the way back to 1999. I am not a photographer but Ian is and I was able to go to ground view (aka street view) at the lakes we are going to be camping out, scroll the time of day to night and see the positions of the milky way and the stars. So incredibly cool. I’ve been updating the KMZ file I am using as I am keeping it in a dropbox folder. That way people have access to all the information I keep adding to the map. Very cool.

Summit Post.

Helps break down a lot of the red tape info, road info and logistics for a given area.

Paul,

Definitely! I use Summit post a lot. It contains a lot of good info. There is a website here in Arizona called hikearizona.com It is similiar contains a ton of info on trails, roads to get there, red tape, etc…

Acmemapper for topo maps…

I mostly use a large format road atlas to get ideas.

I then use Topo Maps for iOS on my iPad to view details (easy to pinch out to seen details).

Finally I use the USGS website to print their Topo maps.

Caltopo. And it just keeps getting better!

So many great resources these days.

+1 on CalTopo, it does get better and better.  Especially if you print out your own maps.

I’ve never used Cal Topo. Any tips for its use that you guys can share?

So what is the best way to get high resolution maps with the greatest detail printed from Cal Topo? I am not having much luck in this area at the moment.

I have had Delorme Topo USA for years so that is what I plan on. Maybe not the best but it gives me distances, elevations and profiles and I can draw in my own trails. I just recently figured out how to take the routes I create on that and put them on Google Earth using GPS Visualizer, a great combo for planning and dreaming.

So what is the best way to get high resolution maps with the greatest detail printed from Cal Topo? I am not having much luck in this area at the moment.

I know what you mean, Heath — the native PDFs don’t have enough resolution.

There might be other ways (I’m all ears!), but here are the tricks I use…

1. For map format, choose Geospatial PDF
2. Save the PDF to a Map folder on your hard drive
3. Use your own printer s/w to print it at 600dpi

I take it a bit further and sometimes tweak contrast and brightness in Photoshop to make the contour lines show up better, and might also use unsharp mask (150% at 0.8 pixel) before printing. I print on “weather jet” waterproof inkjet paper made by Rite-in-the-Rain. This is simply one of the most amazing products I have ever encountered. Can be printed on both sides. Optimal setting: “Best photo, plain paper.”

I was wanting to print out the maps at Staples/Fedex store on paper bigger than 8.5 x 11. When I printed it out on 8.5×11 it was real low contrast and none of the features were really visible. That’s not very helpful. But I was trying to print out a very large area. Is it best to print out little chunks  of maps zoomed in or should I find a printer that can print a big map with the proper zoom level??

Sorry, I haven’t done large maps, although I donated $20 for the Caltopo upgrade and can save maps in very large sizes. The thing about printing them out is you sometimes have to experiment to get exactly what you want (contrast/color/resolution), so even if you take a flash drive with the PDF to Staples, it might not come out right. But maybe they’ll do a small section test print to confirm? I dunno, I haven’t tried that before.

Might be easiest in that case to go onto mytopo.com and create whatever scale you like with sizes from 18″x24″ up to 5’x8′ (!). A waterproof 24″x36″ map costs about $15, so not unreasonable. I have a (24″x36″) I got years ago for the Presidential/Carter-Moriah ranges in NH and it is still in excellent shape despite quite a lot of use.

For Cal Topo printing, I take overlapping screen shots of the entire area, paste them all into Photoshop, then align them all and merge into a single high resolution seamless TIF file. Next you can add layers for custom text or graphics to supplement the map data. Then you can print any part of the TIF file to make your own series of 8.5×11 printed maps to carry while hiking. You can also save sections of the TIF file as jpg files, then overlay them in Google Earth, orient and stretch the overlay to match the GA coordinates, then export as a file that your GPS can display.

Thanks Lester. I have never used Photoshop, don’t know if I have time to learn how to use it any time soon.

I tried uploading the gpx file to mytopo but it never loads the map.

Obviously Google Earth rules. You can put topo overlays in GE. Go to this page and click the “view on google earth” button: Earth Point Topo

There are others available too.

Getting gpx files from your GPS into GE and getting your kml files from GE onto your GPS requires a conversion tool, and this simple website does the job very nicely: GPX 2 KML

For packing and trip lists I always used to use an excel spreadsheet and print out a page with check boxes and walk around with a clipboard. More recently I have used a nice app on my iPad called Packing Pro: Packing Pro It takes a little while to get your stuff entered and the interface is a little weird at first, but you can put items in collapsible categories with custom icons which is really nice. You can even enter weights.

Philip I learned about the topo maps in GE yesterday! Very cool and yeah the first thing I googled after installing Google Earth was “how to convert a gpx file to kmz. Very handy!!! I use lighterpack.com to keep track of all my gear.

I’ve not had any trouble with resolution on the Geospatial PDF’s.  Sometimes the printing is not the crispest but I find Kinkos does a better job for some reason than Staples but I have done both on 11X17 paper.  Paper quality has some to do with it.  I just carry a thumb drive in and let Kinkos staff do it.

This is a little esoteric in that it mainly helps you visualize coastlines and is Alaska-specific, but the Alaska Shorezone website is a really cool planning tool for sea kayakers and coastal travelers: Alaska ShoreZone

Basically they flew (almost) the entire coastline of Alaska and shot continuous video and periodic still images of the intertidal area at low tide to visually document ecological communities. This is a great tool for sea kayakers because it makes it dead simple to find nice camping beaches. The still images often show the hillsides behind the beach so you can get a feel for vegetation coverage and terrain so that you can find nice (or at least less hellish) routes up into the alpine. I have used this site extensively for my sea kayak trips, but also my cross-island hikes.

http://www.hillmap.com/    works great for me and I can make my own custom maps to print on National Geographic paper.