USGS Historical Topographic Maps | Hacker News Reader

USGS Historical Topographic Maps

esri.com

240 pointsbryanrasmussen42 comments

I went on a tour of the USGS in Palo Alto in 2012. They used to keep all the Bay Area Topo maps there. The curator of the museum had a burning hatred for Google (which was basically across the street).

He told us that Google is 100% to blame for the cancellation of the USGS topographic maps program. Their management told him "Google is capturing it all now, so we don't need to do it anymore". He hated them with a burning passion because he was told to turn over all of his maps to Google for digitization into Google Maps because they would be shutting down the paper archives that he was in charge of.

He wasn't mad because his job was going away (they were going to reassign him anyway) -- he was mad because he felt that it wasn't right for Google to be in charge of archiving and controlling access to what was public information. He was also mad because Google's maps weren't nearly as good as his.

I hope that guy is still around and happy to see that the topographic maps live on and are freely available now.

Geez. Thats sad indeed. Seems management does NOT give a shit about data distribution. Yeah, but all into google, and they will do with it whatever thet want, even shutting it down later. Stupid. I myself also have open hatetred for them. I run my own maps aggregation service (Leaflet FTW!) and Im aggregating service from google, openstreetmap, USGS/ESRI and some local tiles provider as well. I would be glad to get even more free sources (especially SAT images), but unfortunately cannot find anything decent.

As professionals often vastly overestimate the knowledge and understanding of people outside their field, I think we underestimate the lack of sophistication of government in the then new domain of modern IT.

The US military, for example, allowed private vendors to own the code and data on which warfare and lives depended, not to mention future integration and updates. The military has learned, and now requires government ownership (at least in many cases), and even open, modular systems to facilitate integration with other vendors.

menlo park, parking lot in the back.

The manager of the USGS maps group chatted for a minute, bitterly deriding the closure of his unit (in a giant empty room where the conversation was had). No mention of Google specifically, but also no mention of the facts about purely optical and print methods. Their production line was all pre-digital type?

The maps are available directly through the USGS as well, if you want to avoid the 3rd party viewer:

https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/#4/40.01/-100.06

The USGS's viewer is kind of odd in that unlike every other online map in existence, double clicking does not zoom in. It also overlays all of the maps with a weird color tint (which you can fix by turning off "Turn map boundaries on or off" in Settings). Both viewers annoyingly fill your browser history every time you move around or change zoom levels.

[Edited to remove snark]

> Both viewers annoyingly fill your browser history every time you move around or change zoom levels

To be fair that's not limited to map viewers. A lot of web apps do that. I think finding the right balance is a bit of an art.

Maybe let the USGS folks know? If they're anything like any other department, they have one person whose job it is to work on every single website, and they're not well-researched web developers, they're a jack of all trade who had to learn just enough tricks on a page by page basis to keep things from falling apart, with a mandate to leave things alone until they break.

Also, if USGS doesn't have the resources to improve this, propose they post it as a challenge for public solutioning: https://www.challenge.gov/

Sometimes, an agency is in need of a willing helping hand.

> Both viewers annoyingly fill your browser history every time you move around or change zoom levels.

So a lot of us that actually use this stuff love that we can copy that URL at any particular moment. Is there a way to do that and not show up in browser history?

> So a lot of us that actually use this stuff love that we can copy that URL at any particular moment. Is there a way to do that and not show up in browser history?

Yes, there is a specific browser API you can use to do that, or an older technique of using the fragment part of the URL for that kind of data.

While we're at it, USGS also has the complete current topographic maps for the entirety of US available to download:

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-do-i-find-download-or-order-to...

https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/can-i-get-bulk-order-usgs-topograp...

The complete set of offline topographic maps in GeoPDF format with embedded satellite image layer (that can be enabled or disabled if your PDF reader can handle layers properly) is ~2.8 Tb.

Whenever i see a topo map I recall my college days when I had a mountaineering buddy who took us out to middle of wilderness in his jeep with nothing but a topo map and a compass on a snow shoe hike on the San Francisco Peaks in Flagstaff, AZ. We were trying to hike to a cabin but a snow storm cropped up and had to find a fast way down - his skills with a compass and that map were amazing and we made it back to his jeep in 30 minutes what it had taken us the previous 3 hours to hike (we had a couple of daring downhill rides/jumps).

With GPS and all nowadays it feels like that skill might be lost, but hopefully there are some guys out there daring enough to keep it going to take those of us who dont know out for an adventure

I do usually carry a paper map and compass if I'm somewhere I don't know well. I have broken a phone and had the battery die and am very aware that I'm a dropped phone away from being utterly and completely lost.

The only times I have made significant route finding mistakes in the last ten years were after I started using a GPS for route finding - in both cases I took the wrong ridge down from a peak. My wife was also in a group that managed to descend completely the wrong side of a mountain the first time the person leading used a GPS...

If you’re in the wilderness you should know how to navigate with map and compass, and check your gps. A no-power backup could save your life.

This is the same reason you should know how to make a fire even if you have a stove. I’ve had a stove fail due to dust in the PRV. A fire kept us warm.

Be prepared.

Local adventure racing and orienteering organizations typically have beginner classes that teach map and compass navigation. At least the one near me does every couple of months.

Not sure how popular rogaining is in the US, but it's very fun and might appeal to a lot of HN users. In South Australia at least, every event has map and compass lessons beforehand for newcomers.

https://orienteeringusa.org/explore/what-is-rogaining/

For me it was scouts; the scout master would bundle us all in the back of a van at night, drive us a couple of miles in a random direction and then task us to find our way back to camp with nothing but a map & compass.

It was a real adventure; we had no idea that the troop leaders were 50 meters away keeping tabs us through night-vision goggles all night.

You should see if there are orienteering courses in your area. It is a fun activity. It's like playing chess while running.

https://orienteeringusa.org/explore/what-is-orienteering/

That's cool to see, I remember in high school the ROTC came to track practice to get people to come out for orienteering meets. Turned out to be a fun/useful experience.

Not map and compass, but the book The Natural Navigator is excellent for honing your skills.

https://www.naturalnavigator.com/

You can get these direct from USGS in KMZ, GeoTIFF, GeoPDF, and JPEG format.

And mobile apps like Topo Reader and Avenza Maps for iOS will let you load them for live referencing. I just “discovered” this yesterday, by chance.

https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/hi...

https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/#4/39.98/-99.98

Boston gets a lot of attention for its drastic changes even over the past century. Comparing modern Boston to its 1893 map:

* All of Logan airport, Winthrop, etc simply didn't exist

* MIT was a mud flat

* South Bay was still a bay, not a shopping center

* Obviously pre-interstate, railroads dominate the transportation focus

* Back Bay has already been filled in. The collection of mini-street grids is apparent in Back Bay and South Boston (Southie).

* The isolation of the Boston peninsula is less apparent at this point. E.g. Paul Revere's "one if by land, two if by sea" for the British heading NW to Lexington.

Worth it for the link to the 224 page

History of the Topographic Branch (Division) https://pubs.usgs.gov/circ/1341/pdf/circ_1341.pdf

with all manner of trivia including: U.S. patents issued to U.S. Geological Survey photogrammetrists etc.

I love these USGS publications. So much history in them.

I also have been building and offering my own UI on top of the USGS collection of maps (among others in the public domain) at https://pastmaps.com if anyone else finds the existing UIs frustrating like I do. This is a labor of love and something I'm continuing to chip away at and make better and better with time

Interestingly enough, I ended up discovering some incorrect data in their system as part of my ingestion process 4 months ago and directly worked with the USGS to both report the pipeline errors causing bad output and they were incredibly prompt and open to collaborating on identifying the issue and proper fix (roughly a 2 week turnaround from original report to correction). I honestly wonder if this 1700+ update to the ESRI collection is a direct result of that work because the numbers do roughly align so that would be exciting!

I have boxes and boxes of these in storage. A library was being closed in my home state of Colorado , where the USGS is based, and I couldn't let them get thrown away.

crucial when the electricity is out for weeks! does no one any good unless they can be found at that time though..

I was obsessed with topographic maps as a kid—had the paper maps for most of the counties in my corner of my state. Led to an interest in geography, and is the reason my usernames on most platforms have been my name+geo for the last two decades. You could buy the quadrant maps at various general stores in my area, and bought a few of the larger county maps at the PA farm show. Those maps were huge—the size of a large rug, but incredibly detailed (showed individual houses outside of urban areas). At the time I was collecting them, the last survey had been done in the 1980s, and it was interesting seeing the in-progress highways marked that were at that time completely built. Looks like there was a gap in the surveys between 1984 and 2010 according to https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/topoview/viewer/, but now have been updated every ~3 years.

Esri is an anticompetitive company leeching taxpayer dollars that only exists because ArcGIS trapped the government before many govcon laws preventing vendor lock in were put in place.

We would have 10x the mapping capabilities and much higher velocity on defense tech without this parasitic company.

Btw, also recently fined for blatant sexism against hundreds of female employees.

Yeah esri sucks and it’s software is worse than open source but it’s the only thing they teach because contracts

The open source geospatial community is pretty amazing :

https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Main_Page

Esri in the cloud is terrible. Geoserver is much better.

Cloud Native Geospatial might break Esri's hold :

https://cloudnativegeo.org/

I remember when how I got maps for cross-country hikes was to go down to the Oakland library and they had a collection of all the USGS quadrangle maps. The lithography of the paper maps was excellent. I'd find the ones for the areas I was interested in (climbing guides list which quads you should have) and Xerox the parts I needed. Sometimes I would order the originals from the USGS or travel to Menlo Park to purchase them at the source. Those stacks of map cases and thousands of maps are now gone. I would have loved to have picked up that full collection when they got rid of them.

The large size and fine detail of a those lithographs are just not reproducible on a portable screen or printout. It's great to have digital versions available to everyone but the originals are works of art.

this is an original 90s software lock-in company, for context on the deal you are accepting with their services. (see Oracle Corp)

Yep, essentially a Terraserver reboot.

Neat, the historical browser will actually let you download GeoTIFFs (precisely registered TIFF files) and isn't just ArcGIS-specific.

Genealogy value: Awesome for locating defunct places - the ones missing from gen sites' known-locations (when you which area. ex:county).

Biodiversity value as well. Our natural history collections reference specimens that can be hundreds of years old, the labels can be cryptic (see Notes for Nature efforts) and reference places no longer here. Early geological survey work maybe even have been accompanied by biodiversity collectors, there is a nice PhD project in here somewhere to correlate the two efforts.

Anyone know how to search these maps for features? I was able to locate two "secret" climbing areas I'm privy to but zooming to the right location, but it would be cool to identify potential future spots without just scrolling through

If you have a cabin or some natural spot you care about in the US, I highly recommend purchasing an actual USGS paper topo map. They are beautiful!

caltopo also has a historical maps layer that is quite easy to navigate https://caltopo.com/map.html#ll=44.0734,-121.27602&z=12&b=19...

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