Topo Map Quebec

[Jovanna Ponder]

TOPOQuebec provides you with detailed topographic maps including Crown Land, ecoforestry layer, the National Trail in Quebec from Rando Qubec, numerous trails, forest and wilderness areas, water bodies, provincial, regional parks and zecs, power lines and railroad tracks as well as major and secondary roads.

Topographic maps are suitable for a wide variety of applications, from emergency management, urban planning, surveying, resource development, to camping, canoeing, hunting and fishing to name a few. Why? Because they represent the earth's features accurately and to scale, on a two-dimensional surface. This section provides information to facilitate the use of topographic maps, and also how to obtain paper and digital maps.

Topographic maps produced by NRCan conform to the National Topographic System (NTS) of Canada. They are available in two standard scales: 1:50 000 and 1:250 000. Each map in this system has a unique number, which is a combination of numbers and letters. The area covered by a given mapsheet is determined by its location in Canada. To understand the numbering of these maps, refer to the National Topographic System Index Maps.

It's winter. I daydream of trips in various areas. Using Google/Apple/Bing maps is frustrating. Openstreet has trails if you are near civilization, but names are weak. None of them have coordinate overlays (Lat/Long, UTM)

The above is a screenshot of Open street map showing the SW corner of Cree Lake, SK, with the Brustad River running down from the north. This is about a 10-15 km view. Not a useful level of information. No names. No portage trails.

I have used google earth on the desktop. No water names to speak of. Few feature names. No boundaries. No real contour lines. No trails. Roads are a matter of being long skinny clearings, and vanish in heavy vegetation. Watersheds once you get below about 25 feet wide aren't conclusive. Since it's aerial photos you get situations where it is very difficult to visualize what you are looking at. This is especially true for steep terrain, where the shadows can lie part way up the next mountain.

Not all agencies have gone through the process of scanning paper maps and producing public web services, but if you want good access to CalTopo, I usually access the layer through peakbagger.com (the author has a licence), which I use regularly anyway.

You don't say what area of the world you are looking for maps of, but I see your profile locates you in Alberta.If you were looking for locations in the USA, mapper.acme.com tiles USGS topo maps across the whole country like this:

QGIS- a free and open source GIS software package is available for windows, Apple, and Linux. You may find yourself spending some of your winter hours over at GIS Stack Exchange learning to use QGIS.In QGIS you could add a new layer as a WMS layer and post this into the URL to get a seamless topo.

Relevant to your question is that you can pay another 8-10$ and unlock the download topo maps for areas that have them. More exactly, I think it downloads contours, and some things, like say trails, might still be coming from OpenStreetMap, rather than a full-on hiking-type, high-detail, topo map. It's vector based, so it zooms in and out very well.

Used on an iPad, it's quite good. Even a small phone is quite acceptable (I have an SE). Note that iPads come in wifi-only and cellular flavors. Only the cellular (about $150 more) has on-board GPS, which works even if you don't put in a SIM for it.

It also downloads landmark descriptions off Wikipedia and you can put annotated markers on the maps. One drawback is its zoom in/out hiding of features - if you're talking about a really small trail or road, Pocket will hide it until you zoom in enough, even if the general area is featureless and has no other roads. That does make it hard to plan a big picture trip (you can add your own markers to let you where to zoom, but...).

Edit: for some reason, their contours only download for the lower half of SK, your lake is in the twilight zone, apparently. This is odd, I have seen contour data for everywhere else, including in Peru.

Topo, free IIRC, is in many ways much more rudimentary than PocketEarth, but it does acquire general topo maps for Canada (3 different types). It does not show grid lines, and worse, does not display your GPS location, but it does stitch topo tiles (of the same type) together.

Here's a location near your lake, with 2-3 tiles stitched together. I've added the lines and flag, which provide very basic annotation capability. You can apparently also add GPX maps. It has gotten better since I first used it, and stopped doing so, now it looks more optimized in terms of zoom and lag time.

Also, Government Canada provides freely downloadable topo maps (not always recent), once you figure out their very confusing website. I've done it before, and gotten my maps, but it's painful. Here's an entry point for it.

I'm not sure if it covers Canada or not but have you checked out the GaiaGPS app? It's phone rather than desktop but it can serve up topos at a variable scale, I just don't know how much of the world is covered.

2. This program reads all the input shape files, and determines, based on file name what output file to translate them in to. It also needs to make entity type assignments. The file format I need to upload to mapcenter has a different set of allowable elements than the input file. Every time I hit an element type that I don't already know, a message box pops up and asks me what I want to assign it to in the output file (so the input could be something like "wat_dis_l", and the output something like 0x0013).

3. The final program adds in the road data. The road data distributed with the topo maps is ridiculously out of date, so I'm taking my roads from a different source (geobase.ca), that is less than a year old.

Last but not least, I have to write a little script to (one at a time) rename each of my map files to build.mp, then individually zip them, and upload them (using cURL) to mapcenter for compilation. I mostly use excel, and wordpad to make the batch file.

I'm now in the process of uploading the two NTS grids to Could take a while though, as they total about 1.88GB of data (uncompressed) after zipping, they should be about 1/3 of that (compiling them will make them much smaller still)

In the process of running 011. Going to take me a little longer to get this one done, as I don't have the road network for Newfoundland and Geobase is down at the moment. Could get the roads from StatsCan, but their data is generally as good quality.

011 and 092 are now uploading to the compiler website...Should be compiled some time in the next 24 hours or so... I'd run in to trouble, as I'd apparently hit the maximum number of allowed maps (1111) on the site, so I had to create a new userid.

Eventually, I plan to add all of Canada. I've been holding off on Qubec a little, as I think I should do it in French, rather than English, but my dataset isn't split by province, its split by NTS grid (except roads... roads are split by province).

Horray! I appreciate any feedback you might have as far as things like layering (what shows at what zoom), and entity classification goes (i.e. if I've done something silly like call a river a road or something like that).

I am currently planning a 2010 trip that will feature about 1,250 miles through the Canada, mostly in the Yukon but I may also pass through corners of British Columbia and/or the Northwest Territories. Obviously I will need to map out this portion of my trip, and I was hoping to find a TOPO!-like software package for the task.

I recently spent almost a day researching Canadian topographical map products, and below I am reporting my findings in the hope that I can save others some time, frustration, and expense. I describe the products roughly in order of their functionality, from the most basic to the most powerful/full-featured.

I am aware that this list does not include every mapping software product available for Canada, but I believe it includes the bulk of them. If you think a product should be included in this list, send me an email telling me about it and I will update this page.

2- The CTI has made all of its maps available via FTP through its GeoGratis portal. There is no cost for or restrictions on the maps. This option would work for a short trip: only a few maps would need to be downloaded; they could be easily stitched together in Photoshop; and a new map (or two) that covers the entire trip could quickly be printed. For a long trip, however, this would be a very tedious process.

This package includes a proprietary map browser, Fugawi Map Viewer, as well as digital scans of the CTI maps for each province, sold separately. Note: Map packages for the territories are not available. At just $50 this package is less expensive than TopoTracker or Etopo, but the map browser is not as robust or fully-featured as Memory-Map Discoverer, and personally I would probably be willing to invest in the more powerful software. With the Fugawi Map Viewer, the user can only do the following three things: pan seamlessly across the map images, print selected areas, and search a geographical index.

We've mapped every hill and valley for your next great adventure. This map covers the finer details of the outdoors, including terrain contours, topo elevations, summits, routable roads and trails, rivers, lakes and geographical points.

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