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.

This evening I added in the Yosemite Valley shuttle bus map. I also obtained campground maps from each campground (except Camp 4)… yes, some of them are a bit more low-resolution than I would like, but it’s the best I could do. I might be able to get a Camp 4 map later. I know maps of this place exist, but whether free public-domain maps exist is another matter altogether.

I went ahead and published what I’ve finished on Grand Canyon National Park so far. I’ll have several more maps to upload, but I just ran out of time to finish the page tonight. Still, a decent start, and the page seems to be working properly, so I decided to go ahead and publish what I’ve got.

I’ve got another couple pages completed: Olympic maps and Yosemite maps. I guess “completed”  is the wrong word, as I plan to keep adding new maps as I come across them. There actually are some ollllllld Olympic trail maps I came across; they’re not pretty, but might not be a bad addition. At this point, however, I’m choosing quality over quantity. After all, I’ve got a lot more national park maps to upload! If I keep up my one-page-per-day pace…. then, well, I’ll be busy through Thanksgiving just doing the sites designated as national parks.

Then you add in the NPS-managed national monuments, national recreation areas, national seashores and lakeshores… Oh. I’m going to be a busy man. What have I gotten myself into?

So far, I’ve got four parks pretty much finished: Acadia, Arches, Death Valley, and Hawaii Volcanoes.

Those Hawaii Volcanoes maps are beautiful. It’s nice to see that this is the direction the new maps are going. The Haleakala ones are even more amazing looking… I just haven’t gotten to uploading those maps yet. Soon!

The Acadia page seems to be mostly complete, thanks to the decent number of maps available. Same with Death Valley.

It’ll be interesting to see as this goes on – whether I’m able to find lots of maps for all the parks, or whether a number of them will end up pretty short like the Arches page currently is. I’d like to have more than just the two maps like Arches, but I know for some parks that’s  just not going to be an option.