My New Favorite Website

This coming week I will be heading out on another adventure. My son reserved a yurt (a very sturdy tent with a wood-burning stove and bunk beds) in the Uinta Mountains and we will be skiing to it. Once we get there, we will have a nice dinner and a relaxing evening. Then the next day we will hike around to some peaks in the area and ski down them. It should make for a fabulous adventure assuming the avalanche danger doesn't thwart us from making the trip.

My son came over this evening so we could plan out some details for the trip. I pulled out my map of the area and discovered that the scale of my map is just too small for where we will going. I wanted a much larger map with more detail and so my son sent me to CalTopo.com. Then I just zoomed in on the map until I had the right detail for the area we will be visiting.

Next I added a marker on the map with the GPS coordinates of where the yurt is located. That took a bit of conversion as I had degrees, minutes, and seconds but CalTopo wants just degrees with following decimals. Fortunately that just took a quick change in the configuration and I had my marker and label.

I wanted to print a very detailed map and so I decided 2 maps would be helpful. One for the hike in and the second for the mountains to the south of the yurt. The second map will be for our skiing. I easily created a PDF of both maps and then printed them on my color laser printer.

Right now I can just put the maps in a zip-loc bag and not worry about them getting wet. In the future I would like to have maps printed on waterproof paper and so I did a quick Internet search. Sure enough, there are a number of sources for the stuff and so I ordered 500 sheets of "Rite in the Rain" paper. I had a $20 gift card for the online store I used and so it only cost me another $50. It should pay for itself in no time at all because I use a lot of maps for my numerous adventures.

I'm pretty excited about the upcoming trip and being able to find detailed information is very helpful. That makes CalTopo.com my new favorite website.