08-24-10 - Free Trail Maps

Don't support those Green Trails cocksuckers who charge $400 for their maps. (if you do have the Green Trails maps, I encourage you to post them for public use on the net; you fuckers have abused your right for me to respect your copyright; in fact I vaguely considered buying a set just to scan it and post it, but they're not even worth that).

It's most appalling because all the maps are based on the USGS data, which is paid for by our fucking tax dollars. Fortunately there are some perfectly good free map sites :

libremap.org : Libre Map Project - Free Maps and GIS data
digital-topo-maps.com : Free Printable Topo Maps - Instant Access to Topographic Maps
ACME Mapper 2.0

Of these, digital-topo-maps.com is the easiest to browse around cuz it just uses Google maps (actually, it seems to be like 10X faster than Google's own interface, so it's actually just a nice way to browse normal maps too).

Libre Maps is the most useful for hiking with because it has nice printer-ready pages in high quality.

Also, I sometimes forget that Google still has the Terrain maps because they are hidden under More... now. I'm sure somebody has done trail overlays for Google Terrain, but I haven't found it.