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by gen220 2281 days ago
For my Boy Scout troop’s bigger hikes, we would download the PDFs, mark our trails with highlighters in Preview, then print and laminate them to circumvent this issue. Some of the maps are still good to use today, a decade later.

Caveat that I have no idea if this is/was legal, but there’s ways to get physical copies of the maps without dealing with the bureaucracy :).
1 comments
xtiansimon 2280 days ago
Mounting maps. When I was in the Boy Scouts we learned to mount USGS maps on cloth.

I found a blog post which describes the process.

When I was in the Scouts, we would visit the USGS office in Palo Alto, CA to buy topo maps. Visit the USGS site to see if there is a location near you.[2]

[1]: http://www.mrgus.net/2017/02/maps-for-going-afield.html [2]: https://www.usgs.gov/connect/locations

link
gen220 2280 days ago
Super fascinating, I'm going to try this out. Thank you for sharing!

Where we were hiking, it was unfortunately raining non-stop for a couple of days, and the laminated plastic made a big difference.

But you can always read the map under covers or something, as long as it's transported in a watertight bag, I think the cloth solution might last longer than ours did (plastic forms creases).

link