Four new parks completed over the last few days! I even got two from the eastern U.S. finished; I thought they must have been feeling a little left out.

I hit the motherlode with Shenandoah National Park maps: 23 uploaded, right off the bat. Right now I think only Yosemite has more… although I’m sure that will change.

Everglades is rather tricky since it’s such a unique park; I had difficulty figuring out how to classify and organize the maps I’ve got so far. Not too many places on earth where you have hiking trail maps and canoe trail maps for the exact same region, as was the case with Flamingo. I absolutely love their park brochure map, though – it’s maybe one of the most colorful maps from any national park.

Bryce Canyon was one of my quickest pages to complete – I think the fact that it’s such a small park means that it’s not that possible to have too many different maps, since they all kind of show the same place, just in different ways.

Haleakala National Park has the absolute best looking maps I’ve come across so far. The three-dimensional views of the island of Maui are gorgeous; I’d love to have one of those printed out and hung from the wall. The file sizes may be big, but they’re definitely worth checking out.

Two more parks for you: Glacier and Saguaro.

Glacier National Park has a really nice set of maps, especially if your interest is in hiking trails. They’ve done a nice job putting together hiking maps for each section of the park. I also appreciate the campground maps, although a number of them are quite ugly. Hopefully those will be next on the list to modernize!

Saguaro National Park seems to have a pretty old park brochure map; they must have been near the bottom of the list for service-wide updating. The official Saguaro park brochure maps look much like the old versions of many other parks… I wonder if a new one is coming down the pipeline?

Tonight’s update wasn’t too exciting, but it was in important one. I had contacted the National Park Service earlier just to make sure I didn’t run afoul of any regulations, and that I was in the clear with all the maps I was posting. I just wanted to make sure that these were all indeed public domain and free to distribute. My big question was regarding maps that included the NPS arrowhead, which is trademarked.

I received a reply today and was told that anything with an NPS arrowhead cannot actually be rehosted. So I took down a few of the PDF files that contained the arrowhead (mostly from Yosemite and Grand Canyon) and just stuck with the arrowhead-free JPG images. So if you’re wondering why some maps don’t have PDF links, it’s probably because the PDF file contained an arrowhead. Honestly, the PDFs probably aren’t super important in the end, but I’d like to provide visitors with the option to download them if possible.

So, no new maps or pages up today! We’ll try again tomorrow.

The first iteration of the pages for Redwood, Zion, and Yellowstone national parks is completed. I haven’t come across too much for Redwood yet,  but I’m optimistic I’ll find more. At this point I’m only uploading maps that I know are public domain; later I’ll send out emails asking for permission to post other relevant maps that may not be non-public domain, such as California State Park maps in the Redwoods.

I’m happier with my start on Yellowstone and Zion. I was able to get a decent number of maps just from digging through the park websites and the Harpers Ferry map library. I’ve improved upon Zion’s website, even; both the wilderness campsite map and the hiking maps were separate pages in PDF files. By merging them into single maps, I’ve made these maps much easier to use. I will continue to look for opportunities to create better maps than on the Park Service websites.

I’ve also gone back to some of the first pages I created and have reduced the sizes of some of the JPG files a bit. I’ve been generating the JPGs from PDF files, and some of them I created at a needlessly high resolution, which was a bit overkill. So I’m in the process of shrinking them down a tiny bit, so they’re large enough to be easily readable but not an unnecessarily large file size.

Next up: reducing some more map file sizes, as well as adding in external links on Yellowstone, Zion, and Redwood for the maps I don’t have, such as detailed trail maps and topo maps. I’m struggling a bit between using my time to just start getting tons of pages up, versus getting every page as complete as possible before moving on to the next. I guess it’s fine whatever I end up doing, since either way it’s progress. It does feel good to have 10 parks up for now, after all!

As  far as I can tell, I got the Grand Canyon page pretty much finished today. I’m sure I’ll continue building it over time as I uncover more maps, but I feel pretty happy with the foundation of over a dozen maps. Ready to move on to another park! After too much time on one park you start going a little bit crazy…

I made a small, yet hopefully significant improvement today. I decided it was important to add an introductory line to the top of each park page stating how many downloadable maps were available for each park.  I think it’ll be helpful for visitors to determine whether they want to spend some time scrolling down beyond the first map link.

I think there will be some minor temptation to increase my map counts by adding useless or irrelevant maps just to get that number higher, but I’m pretty sure that won’t happen. I definitely want to stick to quality over quantity – I’m not going to post some lower quality maps just to get the map count higher. (I did a lot of self-censoring already on the Grand Canyon page – I could have posted quite a few useless maps!) Besides, I’ve got so many parks to go – at this point I’m looking for excuses to not post maps rather than the other way around.