After about a year of design, we’ve made a public draft of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park Trail Atlas. The atlas consists of 3 parts.

The first part is a series of 18.25″ x 13″ full-color maps that show the entire trail network, land cover type, miles between all backcountry campsites, pioneer places, a bird’s eye view, and elevations for most landmarks (such as trail intersections, campsites, trailheads, gaps, summits, etc…). The below images link to the 1:96k scale map of the park. For samples of other maps, visit this page. If you would like more detailed online samples, then please contact us and we’ll be happy to provide you access.

The second part is a 4.5″ x 6″ 32-page booklet that explains our trail acronyms, gives cumulative elevation gain for every trail (in both directions), and is a gazetteer for major locations.

The third part is a downloadable GPS data pack for trails, intersections, backcountry features, and other useful information for exploring the park. This data pack is currently retailed here, but with an online purchase of the atlas, the data pack will be offered as an additional download.

We like to think that we’ve created a truly unique and helpful atlas. Our maps have 1-minute latitude-longitude and UTM grids for GPS location. We print in process color, but we treat CMYK as spot colors too, and our goal is to maximize the map’s clarity and readability. Our elevation hillshades are designed with minimal amounts of black ink; that helps separate background and foreground. All of maps are custom created from raw GIS & GPS data and we spend many laborious but loving hours designing the best navigation aids for the areas they cover.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 18th, 2008 at 12:36 am and is filed under News, Great Smoky Mountains. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.