I'd never seen this before. Seems pretty good to me, except I thought it was Pig Flat, not Big Flat. Who cares? Either one you call it, it's not flat. LOL
All the categories they have maps in:
city facilities and parking
city bus
creeks and the environment
downtown
economic development
fire
general interest
housing
parks and recreation
Planning Development and Land Use
police,redevelopment
streets and storm drains
water and sewer
water conservation
Nice map.
So with this map, and maybe one that has distances, I'd like to try to figure out the route of the bike race that will be there in a couple weeks.
Starts going up Canyon trail, ends going down Rough Go, and is 18.5 miles long. Any guesses?
Nice map, but it's kind of hard on the eyes! Here's a link to the map from the state park brochure that's been aggregated into a single image- and it's the one I most often reference too.
You're absolutely correct. The map does contain lots of information and can show a lot that many other maps can't (e.g., correspond photographic terrain detail to the precise routing and elevation of each trail), but between the jumble made up of a blotchy aerial photo background and the over-dense and multi-color elevation curves, legibility and clarity were clearly not high on the priority list during its design.
In fact, I think there have been some backward steps taken in the common sense employed in map usage in general lately, with the proliferation of free and online map resources and satellite imagery. This is a pet peeve of mine.
One of the worst examples of these is the overuse of Google Earth screenshots as map images in TV news stories. A lot of times I encounter a screenshot showing a marker labeled "208 Pine Terrace" (or whatever) as the site of a home fire and the image includes nothing other than the surrounding dozen or so blocks where nothing else is labaled. Well, thanks for that. I now can see that it's a nice tree-lined street and that 11 of the neighbors of the burning house have swimming pools, and there are three larger rectangular buildings with gray rooftops a couple of blocks away. So, how exactly does that help me to place this location?
Wouldn't it have been much more informative and much easier on the eyes to show a simple diagram with a plain background and a couple of lines representing the nearest major avenues or freeways, perhaps with a couple of additional labeled dots showing some nearby town names? But, no. Since aerial imagery is the newest thing in mapping, that automatically means that it's better, right?
Similar cases occur when they show a map marking the location of a coastal town, say, affected by a storm. Alright, so this is a town situated in a terrain that looks like a million blotchy patches of color next to a big body of bluish blotches that probably represent the sea. Maybe even a couple of neighboring town names are labeled as well. But do I know which of the squiggly blotches is the Blindsnake River that I might possibly know in the area and what of the earth-colored patchy quiltwork might be the Goosepimple Mountains? Nope. I guess they could have included some more labeled geographic features, whose labels would have been more legible on a plainer background. But, no. Who needs legibility when you can show the map at an angle, right? "Ooooh!"
You know. Because, just as it is with most things based on technology these days, simply because we can, we should.
But that's a topic for a whole different thread...
Nice map, but it's kind of hard on the eyes! Here's a link to the map from the state park brochure that's been aggregated into a single image- and it's the one I most often reference too.
Nice map, but it's kind of hard on the eyes! Here's a link to the map from the state park brochure that's been aggregated into a single image- and it's the one I most often reference too.
I also find that satellite images rarely add much of value to maps. They're often just a bunch of gray fine grain clutter. You can't easily see the features you want like trails and streams. A simple map highlighting the features of interest is of much greater value.
I'd still prefer the first color contour map if only they'd had eliminated the satellite images that just make a bunch of clutter.
I agree about the overuse of Google earth...and I do dig your map Wherewolf...but all that aside, in this case, Annadel is so flat that you really don't need a topo.
I love playing around with Google Earth and interactive maps. I appreciate several of the maps shown here, and they are fun to examine and manipulate on my computer. But the one I want to take with me and use on the trail is mine.
I love playing around with Google Earth and interactive maps. I appreciate several of the maps shown here, and they are fun to examine and manipulate on my computer. But the one I want to take with me and use on the trail is mine.
It's hard to argue with that. I like your map especially because of the clear distinction between singletracks and fire roads.
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Originally Posted by BigLarry
