After finishing up a stretch of some larger parks with lots of maps, I’ve focused on doing a few smaller national parks recently: Badlands, Big Bend, and Guadalupe Mountains. Compared to other national parks where I have 15+ maps in many cases, I don’t have too many for these parks yet: 3, 7, and 2, respectively.

So far with Badlands National Park I only have maps from the official park brochure – the whole park, a detail map, and a regional map. I’m hoping to come across some more; I have a bicycle map ready to upload but am looking for a higher-quality version; I hate uploading maps that are pixelated and hard to read. Quality over quantity.

I’m a fan of the good start I got with Big Bend National Park maps. Not only do I have the main maps from the brochure, but I got some detail maps and campground maps too. Interestingly, I was not able to find the Rio Grande Village map on the National Park Service web site; it was only on Reserve America’s campground reservation page that I found this map. Why on Reserve America and not the NPS page when it’s an NPS map? Good question.

So far my Guadalupe Mountains maps page is the the shortest one since Arches. I’ve never been to Guadalupe Mountains yet, so I don’t know much about the park, but the website is pretty sparse and it seems like the park is primarily used by hikers ascending Guadalupe Peak. It does look like there’s some nice wilderness in the northern section of the park, but there’s very little info and no detailed maps I could find on the NPS website. We’ll save a more in-depth search for another day.

So although none of these pages feel incredibly finished and useful, psychologically it is nice to get a few parks done in the time it would otherwise take me to do a single park like Grand Teton. (Grand Teton will be coming shortly, featuring plenty of maps!) Originally my plan was to complete all 59 national parks before moving on to the monuments, seashores, recreation areas, parkways, memorials, etc…. but now I’m wondering whether this is the best use of my time or whether I should start including some other park sites first. Either way, I’ve just got to keep trucking along! I’ve got a great foundation, and now I’ve got to start filling things in.

I slowed down a little bit this week, unfortunately. Real life gets in the way sometimes, so it took nearly a week to add in three more parks.

Although the Mammoth Cave maps page isn’t too exciting yet, I’m glad to get another non-western park uploaded. Hopefully later I’ll be able to find some public domain maps of the caves themselves, but the trail and road maps are a good start for now.

Mount Rainier is one of my favorite national parks, and my Mount Rainier maps page is definitely one of my favorites. I love that there are trail maps for each section of the park (Paradise, Longmire, Sunrise, etc.) and also the entire trail system showing the Wonderland Trail campsites. The winter maps are fun too; I think this is the first one I’ve encountered with a “snowplay” area!

The new Great Smoky Mountains maps page contains what I think is the best free trail map I’ve come across so far:  every trail i the park, with trail mileages for everything, and lots of labeled points of interest. The best part? It’s easy to read and very legible. Thus it beats out other similar maps such as Mount Rainier’s trail map.

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.