I Went To The USGS Yesterday

[SandStorm]

The USGS stores are an invaluable asset. In CA they now only carry 7.5 maps for CA. I'm still curious who that was who was in there just before me.

[artrock23]

Without doing a Google search, do any of you know where a USGS map store is in SoCal?

And may I get on a soapbox and whine for a moment? Has the usage of good topo maps really gone down so much that there is no point in selling them? Are people that reliant on GPS or broad area maps? Are people just not going to where you'd need topos? I've done trips with only Tom Harrison maps, but only when I am strictly on well-used trails. And if I had a GPS I'd still bring topos as back-up. (And, no, I don't want to restart the flame wars of GPS vs. maps.) Whiny rant over.

All I use -so far- are Tom Harrison maps. Those things are worth their weight in gold. I've never used a GPS. IMHO, a good topo map & compass (and the ability to use them) should be a prerequisite for venturing into the wilderness.

[SandStorm]

Are the maps bought from the office the same heavy stock as before?

The paper is not heavy stock. And yeah, some of the maps from the USGS site are printed to order and sometimes the quality isn't great. Another reason I like the brick and mortar shop.

[tomba]

I use Hillmap and CalTopo for printing custom topographic maps. Select map type, zoom to the area of interest, and click the print button to create a printable page. For Hillmap use Abduction Firefox add-on to save the printable page as an image, and then print the image. For CalTopo use large custom paper size and print on standard size paper to get higher resolution maps. Printing CalTopo maps from browser doesn't work well in Safari, but works in Firefox.