National Geographic announced a new online service that will, without charge, provide electronic copies of USGS Quads. In other words… FREE MAPS EVERYBODY!!! FREE MAPS!!!
National Geographic is great. Everyone knows that. They curate incredible examples of adventure, wildlife, and landscape photography. They create maps that call countless classroom walls and backpacks home. Now in a rather bold and awesome move National geographic is giving away one of the most useful series of maps to anyone with an Internet connection and a printer.
The new online service an easy to use web interface allows anyone to quickly find any quad in the country. Each of the quads are pre-processed to print on a standard home, letter size printer. These are the same quads that the USGS printed for decades, on giant school-bus-sized presses. But, now they’re available in multi-page PDFs that you can print just about anywhere. They are pre-packaged using the standard 7.5 minute, 1:24,000 base but with some twists:
- Page 1 is an overview map showing the Quad in context
- Pages 2 through 5 are the standard USGS Quads cut in quarters to fit on standard printers
- Hillshading has been added to each page of the PDF to help visualize the topography
You can start exploring here, or just click on the following map. On the site you will find a map that looks very similar to any of the online maps you currently use.
Next, zoom in. Until you see something like this…
After clicking on one of the red icons
Finally click on the small map and you will open a browser page with your map, ready to be printed.
You can print the map on common paper, but a great option is National Geographic’s printable map paper. It’s awesome waterproof stuff, like you see in the maps available at places like REI, but it is getting a little more difficult to find. Fortunately its available.
