Topo50 maps

[sarn.clare]

Hi,

 

Does anyone out there have a list of the Topo50 map sheets needed for the whole trail? (shamelessly trying to save myself work)

 

After always using maps that are printed with North at the top I can’t get my head around the way the maps on the TAT website are orientated and am planning on using the standard Topo50 maps for my walk. If anyone who has done the thru hike has a second hand set of Topo50s that they want to sell, I’d be keen.

 

Cheers

 

Sarn

 

sarn....@vodafone.co.nz

 

[Joe Reich]

Sam let me know how you get on as would be keen finding out the same info - joe

[Charlie]

The strip maps that you mention are version 29 and they have a connection to Geoff's book which references them. This is the set that is on the TAT website. I suspect they will be around for a while for that reason alone.

However I happen to know that there is a v30 set which has (among a number of useful enhancements) Grid North vertical. Yes, I do agree it was pretty confusing at first to have North all over the place. In fairness there is one advantage - the much smaller number of maps.

I know this because I've just carried a set from Auckland to Bluff and it was my experience with the v29 maps from Cape Reinga to Auckland which led to some of the changes being made. And the generous soul who made them was kind enough to give me a full set to use.

Anyway if you email the Trust they may well put a link up with the new set on them. Failing that I guess I could upload them to Dropbox and post you a link. They're about 600Mb so I won't do it unless no-one else will. They are separate PDFs so quite a lot of files.

Note: The track hasn't changed between the two sets and there are still a number of minor issues (like the trail wandering off into the middle of nowhere after Queenstown). But in reality it's not a big deal.

For me (as for some others) Navigation turned out to be a bit of a non-issue (except for a couple of places on the NI - like Auckland). I did look at the maps on the south Island... but it got less and less frequent. What was useful were the GPS points for the trail. The CSV file I prepared is on the TA Facebook page under files (along with a wealth of other info). It was obtained from the Google Earth file (KMZ) which I converted to CSV and then named all the points. There are 48,960 so they need to be loaded as Points of Interest. Works brilliantly. They're about 98% correct - so that 2% is just enough to keep you on your toes without being a serious concern.

For what it's worth I wouldn't carry paper maps or notes again. I'd put the maps on an iPhone and the Notes on a Kindle and be done with it.

For backup I'd have them all converted to Jpgs and visible in my camera on an SD card prepared for emergency use. I did this and never used it, but at least I learnt the necessary technique.

I know this isn't your question but if you are looking for all the track notes in PDF format I have all of those on Google Docs. Let me know if you want them.

That was three days of printing to PDF I'll never have again so I might as well save a few others the effort. They are as at Sept last year of course.

I have discussed with the author of the maps a new set which would be a Vertically aligned strip map which may be the best version of all. It would mean that they no longer correspond to the standard grid naming convention but they would be the minimum number of vertically aligned maps to cover "the trail + X km" (not sure what X will be).

Best of luck!

[David Castle]

Sam,

My wife and I only had a smart phone GPS with Topo50 maps loaded for our walk this year of the South Island section and we wouldn't do it any different.  This worked so well that we are now using a smart phone instead of paper maps for normal tramping.

See "Mobile Map Creator" for creating your maps for your smart phone.

David