A quick history of the USGS topographic map

One of the most common and understandable questions we receive at MyTopo is “when do you update your maps?” Like most topographic map services, our maps are based on the US Geological Survey topo maps. So the quick answer is, whenever the USGS releases a new map! If we dig a little bit deeper, there's more to the story about where these maps come from and where they are going.

The USGS topographic map is a pretty amazing resource. From the 1940’s through 1992, the National Mapping Program (NMP) at the USGS pumped-out over 55,000 uniform, detailed topo maps. The flagship 7.5 minute map series, what we generally call “USGS Quads”, provides a base map that stretches seamlessly from coast-to-coast. These maps became the standard for what we in the United States think of as a “topo map”.

With the completion of the 7.5 minute topo map series in 1992, the USGS switched modes from new map production to map revision. To make a long story short, even what the USGS calls “Basic Revision” is not cheap: an average of $17,000 per map! With over 55,000 maps updating the USGS quads gets expensive fast

The revision programs of the 1990’s produced thousands of new map releases, but the Forest Service Single Edition maps provided the largest contribution of new topographic map information. Topo maps in most National Forest lands are a good deal more interesting than they were before this program: they’ve added road networks including Forest Service roads (with road numbers for easy identification in the field), recreation areas, campgrounds, and even outlined private land “inholdings” within the Forest boundaries so you have a better chance of staying on public lands in the woods.

The Forest Service Single Edition topos are not available most places on the Web, and the folks at Igage Mapping (producers of the AllTopo map software products) were on the ball and agressively filled the hole left in the USGS scanning program by aquiring and scanning all of these maps. They were good enough to share a copy of the new maps with us, and now we have added all of these published maps (and some others the USGS didn't scan) to our map database.

So we’re confident we have the most updated USGS topo maps available. What’s the future of topo maps and plans for updating the one’s already out there? The answer is a bit deeper and we’ll be back with more on the future of the topographic map.

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