Disclaimer: We did get lost in Kansas for about a month. But that was all part of the fun.
Review
Which makes the older paper maps more valuable if you hike or use the maps for off-roading.
Great post.
I remember in my youth paying close attention to a USGS topo map near Lexington Park, MD.
It was under glass bt virtue of my Uncle who was a Navy test pilot. Thereafter I acquired a few hard copy maps, but it is apparent that new tech is making that info more accurate and accessible.
The USGS hard copy maps are worth preservation, framing, and otherwise curious scrutiny.
While in the Army, I had the opportunity to visit a side-lined boxcar that was filled with all the latest USGS maps. Later while in school, I worked in a map library and cataloged thousands of USGS maps that had piled up in a backlog. It was a little depressing to replace maps I had already cataloged with its newer edition. Interestingly, the university somehow acquired a set of topographic maps from Nazi Germany and every sheet was stamped with a spread-wing eagle clutching a wreathed swastika.
Disclaimer: We did get lost in Kansas for about a month. But that was all part of the fun.
Get topoView and you have a selection of historic and current maps with different scales. You can download to several different formats including jpeg, pdf and kmz.
https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/#4/40.01/-100.06
Like Ahnold said, I’ll be back.
Just what I needed this holiday weekend - another reminder I’m slowly becoming a dinosaur. Good maps & the ability to use all their features far surpasses using a mapping device/GPS, IMO. The USArmy placed a high value on map skills and I took it seriously. As another poster noted, the lack of survey markers really devalues the new topo map series. These were vital for those of us in the artillery.
My Dad’s office at the old Missouri School of Mines was a USGS map depository. Rows of file cabinets with wide and deep drawers just maybe 3” tall or so full of maps. He had a huge table that was used for viewing aerial photograph pairs with stereoscopic viewing glasses that made features and terrain pop up out of the pictures. There was also a pantograph like device for tracing contours.
He had a wonderful old Zenith Transoceanic tube type radio he carried with him during the war when he could. We would listen to short wave broad casts at night.
He taught surveying and we would go out for star shot sessions at night with the class. Very cold sometimes but always memorable.
He also would have study sessions at our little duplex and Momma would make spaghetti red, navy beans and cornbread for the starving students. The cornbread was a new Southern thing to the northerners.
That was all in the 50’s.
7-1/2” topo quad maps were the best ever made.
In the 1980s, the method of calculating latitude and longitude changed when the government went from NAD27 to NAD83 (and then NAD84). In some places, such as Texas, longitude changed by as much as 7 seconds.