
Nearly Every USGS Topo Map For Free - wyclif
http://equipped.outdoors.org/2014/10/nearly-every-usgs-topo-map-ever-made.html
======
cryptoz
A killer feature using this dataset would be an API to get ground-level
elevation (above sea level) by passing a latitude and longitude pair. This
exists in about 10 different APIs across the web already, but they're wildly
expensive (or low-res). Google's is wrapped inside Maps for Business, which
IIRC would cost far more than most startups can afford.

Of course, we can get the data "for free" from the USGS. But then we'd have to
host and query the data ourselves, which becomes...expensive. I wonder if
there's an inexpensive solution out there, for high-res elevation APIs?

~~~
danpat
You can already do this fairly easily;

1) Download the SRTM elevation datasource for the region you're interested:

[http://e4ftl01.cr.usgs.gov/SRTM/SRTMUS1.003/2000.02.11/](http://e4ftl01.cr.usgs.gov/SRTM/SRTMUS1.003/2000.02.11/)

2) Load the .HGT files into PostGIS using raster2pgsql:

[http://postgis.net/docs/using_raster_dataman.html#RT_Raster_...](http://postgis.net/docs/using_raster_dataman.html#RT_Raster_Loader)

3) Run your queries, relatively simple:

SELECT ST_Value(elevationraster, Point(51.123,-91.123)) FROM elevation_data;

~~~
cullenking
See my above comment for a library that requires no geospatial database, just
DEM files in gridfloat format. By recording information about each gridfloat
file (bounding box, cellsize in lat/lng) you can do some simple math and only
one disk operation (in the optimal case) to get an elevation value. Even with
my crappy code in the library I mentioned in the other comment, the service is
very fast on even spinning disks.

------
gumby
Not to besmirch the USGS whom I think are great, but unfortunately they
haven't had the funds to update these maps in DECADES and some of them are
woefully out of date.

Yes, it seems hard to believe that a topo can go out of date, but features do
change and in particular trails change.

Still, the fact that USGS has been making these available (on their own site
and now this special one) has shown them to be the on the side of the good
guys.

~~~
Bill_Dimm
Perhaps, but they seem to be more up to date than the maps I bought from
Garmin for my hiking GPS a few years ago. I bought the 2008 version of their
100k maps for the U.S., and found that Lake Nockamixon (1,450 acres) and Marsh
Creek Reservoir (535 acres) were both shown as the tiny creeks that were
present before they were dammed up to create the lakes in 1974 and 1973
respectively. Imagine that you are hiking along and encounter a lake that is a
few _miles_ long that is not supposed to be there. Those lakes are showing up
just fine on the USGS site.

When I complained to Garmin, their response was that it was not an error and I
should buy the (more expensive) 24k maps, which do show the lakes. They
claimed the 100k maps don't have enough "detail" to show the lakes, yet they
do show the tiny little creeks that were there 40 years ago, and they show
other lakes that are only 22 acres. So, Garmin will happily sell you maps
based on 40-year-old data and then charge you more to upgrade to newer data.
By comparison, the USGS maps seem stunningly timely.

~~~
maxerickson
Have you seen this?

[http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/](http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl/)

OpenStreetMap often lacks detail in the U.S. (it wouldn't be surprising for an
area to have missing water bodies...), but maybe you are in an area where it
is useful.

~~~
Bill_Dimm
No, I haven't. Thanks!

------
ephrat
[http://caltopo.com](http://caltopo.com) is the most powerful, free online
topo mapping software I know of. It essentially provides a google maps - like
interface for navigating an array of different maps, including USGS. The print
function is amazing.

~~~
diziet
As someone that goes rock climbing/hiking often and has to rely on remembering
maps, I can't thank you enough for providing this link.

~~~
ephrat
As someone who does the same, I use this pretty much on a weekly basis :) I
hardly look at my Garmin maps anymore.

------
Stratoscope
If you like historical maps as much as I do, this is pretty wonderful.

I'd always heard that there used to be a bunch of airports up and down the San
Francisco Peninsula. Now I can see where they were: Bay Meadows, San Mateo,
Belmont, Cooley (a private airport north of San Carlos), downtown Mountain
View, and a seaplane base by the San Mateo Bridge:

[http://ims.er.usgs.gov/gda_services/download?item_id=5506677...](http://ims.er.usgs.gov/gda_services/download?item_id=5506677&quad=San%20Francisco&state=CA&grid=1X2&series=Map%20GeoPDF)

The circles that look like gears are airports.

If this gets your curiosity going like it did mine, this site has more about
these airports:

[http://www.airfields-
freeman.com/CA/Airfields_CA_SanJose.htm](http://www.airfields-
freeman.com/CA/Airfields_CA_SanJose.htm)

And if you're around Palo Alto, did you know that Hawthorne Avenue, three
blocks north of University, used to be a railroad spur leading to the Catholic
University (now St. Patrick's Seminary)?

[http://ims.er.usgs.gov/gda_services/download?item_id=5503465...](http://ims.er.usgs.gov/gda_services/download?item_id=5503465&quad=Palto%20Alto&state=CA&grid=15X15&series=Map%20GeoPDF)

------
Animats
That's been around for years. It used to be at "seamless.usgs.gov", but now
it's at "[http://nationalmap.gov"](http://nationalmap.gov")

~~~
Animats
Would someone please fix the forum system so that when you put a URL in
quotes, it doesn't think the trailing quote is part of the URL?

~~~
conductor
The quote sign is a legit character in a URL. That is, a valid URL _can_ end
with a quote sign character. I don't think ignoring it would be a good idea.

~~~
dogecoinbase
This is not the case. In fact, the double-quote (along with angle brackets) is
_explicitly_ excluded from valid URL/URIs because it is used as a delimiter,
as the GP post did:
[http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1738#section-2.2](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1738#section-2.2)
[http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2396#appendix-E](http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2396#appendix-E)

~~~
conductor
That's interesting. Before my previous reply I appended a quote sign in my
browser's address bar (in this page) and pressed "enter", expecting it to turn
into %22 in case it's not supposed to be there but the quote sign remained
intact; that's why I posted my reply without checking the RFCs.

~~~
Animats
Basic HTML:

<a href="[http://www.example.com">](http://www.example.com">)

So no, you can't use a quote mark in a URL without escaping it.

~~~
teraflop
Try this: <a href='[http://www.example.com/"'>](http://www.example.com/"'>)

~~~
Animats
Aargh! The forum system actually sent a path of

">

to the server.

~~~
chrisan
I don't think the commenting system is meant to process html. Perhaps it is a
very loose regex of (http(s)?://.*)\s or whatever (sorry I didnt check to see
thats valid!)

<a
href='[http://www.example.com/"'>¯\\_(ツ)_/¯</a>](http://www.example.com/"'>¯\\_\(ツ\)_/¯</a>)

------
bane
Out of curiosity, any other countries provide this kind of data as part of a
government program?

~~~
rav
The Danish Geodata Agency (Geodatastyrelsen, abbr. GST) provide point clouds,
elevation rasters (both ground and surface), topographic maps and more in a
national project that started in 2011. [http://eng.gst.dk/maps-
topography/topographic-data/](http://eng.gst.dk/maps-topography/topographic-
data/)

As an experiment, they even have a couple Minecraft servers running with a
copy of the elevation model in 1:1 (site is in Danish only):
[http://gst.dk/emner/frie-data/minecraft/](http://gst.dk/emner/frie-
data/minecraft/)

------
andrewljohnson
This seems like a reasonable time to plug my app Gaia GPS. You can view a
quilt of USGS topos and other maps here:
[https://www.gaiagps.com/map/#?lat=37.8169&lon=-119.5606&zoom...](https://www.gaiagps.com/map/#?lat=37.8169&lon=-119.5606&zoom=14&layer=CalTopo&overlays=poi_camping,poi_natural,poi_other,poi_parks,poi_trails,tracks)

If you have the app, these maps can be synced to your various devices,
downloaded, and printed for back-up.

We've worked on this for about six years now... founded the company soon after
moving to SF and joining Hacker News.

~~~
nether
I love Gaia GPS, it's my primary GPS app. But the display has been annoyingly
buggy for years (seemingly switching zoom levels randomly sometimes, drawing a
line to a waypoint incorrectly after selecting "Guide me"). Map download
regions can only be set to rectangles when few trails are that shape (e.g. any
trail other than a straight N-S or E-W line will require downloading many
extra tiles). In the map display, it impossible to hide the top row of buttons
- I wish there was a simple gesture, like two-finger swipe up, to toggle
display of _all_ UI elements. That said it's still better than MotionX.

~~~
andrewljohnson
Thanks for your notes. Maybe you can send answers to support@gaiagps.com, but
I have a couple of questions...

1) What version are you on, the latest iOS version we pushed, 9.1.3?

2) When you say it switches zooms randomly, is this just while looking at the
screen, it jumps? Any other info?

3) You can also "Download Map Along Track" too - for any saved route or trail.
We never considered polygonal downloads to be that useful, and also adds
complexity to the UI. We'd do it, but it's not a priority, and we'd want to do
it just right.

4) When the Guide Me line is wrong, in what way? Does it not end on the
waypoint? Does it not start with where you are?

------
peterwwillis
> trails are not currently included as one of these layers—a significant
> drawback for hiking.

= (

Still, it's nice. But a lot of mapping/trail apps will probably still be
charging you money to download topo maps, since it's a significant source of
revenue. Topo maps have actually been available for free for a long time; it's
just really god damn aggravating trying to put them on your device and load
them into your program of choice. Plus, the new PDF format sounds incompatible
with old apps.

~~~
MappingSupport
The US Forest Service has GPS data for many trails. In 2013 I happened upon a
USFS GIS server hosting that data. I began displaying that trail data with my
Gmap4 browser app and asking questions so I understood the data better.

Then the trail data disappeared from the GIS server.

Apparently USFS management was clueless that anyone who (1) knew the address
("endpoint") for the GIS server and (2) had GIS client software, could display
(gasp!) the trail data.

I have seen the trail data. Is it perfect? No, of course not - and it never
will be. Is it more right than wrong? Absolutely!

Certainly the USFS could provide that data to the USGS so many more trails
could be included on the new digital topos but so far the USFS has refused to
do so.

Naturally I filed a FOIA for this trail data and naturally it was denied. My
FOIA appeal is currently pending before the USFS Chief.

Here's a bit of good news. Before the trail data disappeared from the GIS
server I downloaded the data for trails in the national forests in WA, OR and
CA. I then processed that data with some custom code to make it more useful
and produced a series of trail maps with mileages. If you are curious you can
visit the Gmap4 examples page and look down just a bit for the link to the
national forest maps.
[http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/gmap4_examples.html](http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/gmap4_examples.html)

Joseph, the Gmap4 guy

------
davidw
This is one of those "wow, that's amazing!" things about the internet. I used
to save up my money as a kid to buy USGS quads. Naturally, I didn't have that
many of them, and you could only find local ones, and not even all of those
were always in stock. Now... it's all right there for free!

------
toomuchtodo
How difficult would it be to get topo layers into OpenSteetMap?

~~~
maxerickson
You can mix it in during the rendering. For example:

[http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/37.6719/-122.3376&layer...](http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=10/37.6719/-122.3376&layers=C)

Being overly pedantic, there is more or less wide opposition to getting such
data sets "into OpenStreetMap", it's better to treat it as a second data set
at render time (as above).

------
jlarocco
This has been available for a long time.

Another useful site is
[http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/](http://viewer.nationalmap.gov/viewer/)
which is a Google Maps like interface that allows downloading map data, topos,
and other data files.

There's also some web APIs available for retrieving and querying the data at
[http://basemap.nationalmap.gov/arcgis/rest/services](http://basemap.nationalmap.gov/arcgis/rest/services)

The Libre Map Project has a copy of the data (they were really hard to find
for a while) and allows searching for feature names and downloading TIFFs of
USGS quadrangles, TFW files, and TIGER files.

[http://libremap.org/data/](http://libremap.org/data/)

------
tokenadult
I had already downloaded USGS maps of my own town in 2012. The maps are quite
up to date here, and based on beautiful aerial photography. But I upvoted this
submission because the linked article includes the tip about how to enable
USGS information in Google Earth, which is cool.

------
boombip
Here's a similar site for Canada:
[http://geogratis.gc.ca/geogratis/search?lang=en](http://geogratis.gc.ca/geogratis/search?lang=en)

------
timboslice
I have used
[http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/gmap4.html](http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/gmap4.html)
a few times on my phone to show my location on high-res topographic maps. It
works offline which is awesome for saving battery on a long trek

------
bjackman
UK People might be interested to know that the Ordnance Survey is now all
open: [http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-
government/prod...](http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/business-and-
government/products/opendata-products.html)

------
xbryanx
The good folks at MapBox have a nice article on the challenges related to
working with these great but under-resourced data portals:

[https://www.mapbox.com/blog/trouble-with-
geoportals/](https://www.mapbox.com/blog/trouble-with-geoportals/)

------
MappingSupport
Thanks to timboslice for mentioning Gmap4. I am the developer of that browser
app.

By my count there are 5 browser apps that I refer to as enhanced Google map
viewers. Each of us devs have produced our own version of Google maps on
steroids so you can surf maps (including seamless topos), display your data,
or display other data that you find online.

In order more-or-less by launch date, these 5 apps are: ACME Mapper GPS
Visualizer Gmap4 (Joseph Elfelt - that’s me) Hill Map CalTopo (Matt Jacobs)

A few years ago the USGS made very hi-res scans of all (yup “all”) their paper
topos. Matt shipped a box of harddrives to USGS and got back copies of those
scans for the most recently published paper topo for all of the USA. Of course
for some locations the “most recently published paper topo” is rather old.
Matt whipped up some GDAL magic to de-collar those scans and chop them into
tiles. He is hosting the tiles on Amazon’s cloud and invited me to display
them with Gmap4 (where I call Matt’s tiles “t4 Topo High).

Gmap4 default map:
[http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/gmap4.php](http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/gmap4.php)

Gmap4 homepage:
[http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/gmap4.html](http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/gmap4.html)

Finally here is a project I just started a few days ago to use Gmap4 to
display data that (1) is hosted on state and federal GIS servers and (2) shows
public land boundaries and recreation features. Here is the top page for this
project. OK, time to ’fess up. I’m a software dev, not a web designer.
[http://www.propertylinemaps.com/p/public_land_map.html](http://www.propertylinemaps.com/p/public_land_map.html)

You can customize these links. For example, here is one that displays the very
cool New York state bike map zoomed in on a random spot:
[http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/gmap4.php?ll=42.346429,-76.8...](http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/gmap4.php?ll=42.346429,-76.863956&z=12&t=h,NYS_bike_map_all&q=http://www.propertylinemaps.com/p/public_land_map/state/NY/NY_trail.txt)

(The html pages for these public land maps contain a plug for my startup which
georeferences land surveys and property legal descriptions.)

One of the next features I am going to add to Gmap4 is the ability to click a
GIS feature and see a popup with the attributes for the thing you clicked.

Joseph, the Gmap4 guy

------
brudgers
Back in the 90's, I would do screen captures of the free USGS topos from
Microsoft TerraServer to use as location maps for our architectural sets.

------
cc0
I've always just used [http://mapper.acme.com/](http://mapper.acme.com/)

------
atomical
This isn't new. Also, some data sets require sending a hard drive into the
USGS I believe.

~~~
RIMR
Let's say I wanted all of it. How much data is that, or would I have to ask
USGS?

~~~
jleader
Drawing a rough box on a map of the US I estimated about 40 degrees of
longitude by 20 degrees of latitude. The most detailed maps are the 7.5-minute
quadrangles, which I believe are available for nearly all of the continental
US. Since 7.5 minutes is 1/8 of a degree, that gives 40 _20_ 8*8, or a bit
more than 50,000 maps. A quick browse through the USGS site found this quote
([http://store.usgs.gov/b2c_usgs/usgs/zproductinformation/%28x...](http://store.usgs.gov/b2c_usgs/usgs/zproductinformation/%28xcm=r3standardpitrex_prd&layout=6_1_61_50_2&uiarea=2&ctype=areaDetails&carea=0000000009%29/.do#75_15Minute)):
"It takes about 57,000 maps to cover the conterminous 48 States, Hawaii, and
territories." They go on to mention that Alaska's most detailed coverage is
the 15-minute quadrangle series. A similar estimate for the 15-minute coverage
of Alaska is around 3000 maps, plus 1/4 of 57K (14K) for the 15-minute maps of
the area already covered by the 7.5-minute series, plus a few thousand for the
smaller-scale series (30x60 minutes, 1x2 degrees, index maps, etc.) So I'd
guess somewhere around 75-85 thousand maps.

The majority of these maps were originally intended to be printed on 23x27
inch sheets of paper. Assuming they were printed at around 300 dpi, somewhere
between 1-8 bits per pixel (after compression, this is the shakiest part of my
estimate!), that's around 50 million pixels per sheet, somewhere around 6-50MB
per sheet. So somewhere between 1/2TB to 4TB for the whole data set (and I
could easily be too low or too high by a factor of 2).

~~~
jleader
Heh, looking at my neighborhood, the smallest available file is a scan of the
1933 7.5-minute Sierra Madre quad, 5.24MB, and the largest is the 1979 30x60
minute Los Angeles quad, 44.53MB. Most of the 7.5 minute quads seem to be in
the 15-30MB range. So I don't feel so bad about my "shakey" estimate of
individual map sizes!

~~~
_almosnow
Derailing the thread a little.

"Always do the math" is a very nice piece of advice that I got from who knows
where. More often than not you nail it.

