That’s a good point. The USGS maps are great for traveling on foot, but they are updated very infrequently, so they can’t be relied upon for vehicle travel. I always stop and pick up a Motor Vehicle Use Map (MVUM) because it will show recent closures (and the occasional new roads, but it seems like that doesn’t happen very often.)
The Paper Maps Thread
- Thread starter B1Toad
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That’s a good point. The USGS maps are great for traveling on foot, but they are updated very infrequently, so they can’t be relied upon for vehicle travel. I always stop and pick up a Motor Vehicle Use Map (MVUM) because it will show recent closures (and the occasional new roads, but it seems like that doesn’t happen very often.)
I like the Gazette maps for big areas, but they don't really show Jeep trails well. The National Geographic and Forest Service maps usually show the trails.
You must be younger than me, mine was the large print truckers mapI still have a couple of them, plus the foldable city map for alot of cities in the southeast!!!!
My Road Atlas is large print AND I have a magnifying glass tethered to it, lol…
I've been mostly digital in recent years but I love paper maps. When I was 10 years old my most prominent wall decoration was a paper street map of the OKC metro with all my friends and relatives houses marked. There was no consumer GPS when I turned 16 but I'd have had no use for it anyway, I knew exactly where I was going. If I went some place new all I needed was the major cross streets. OKC is big too, thanks to a long-standing practice of annexing unincorporated land it covers about 4x the size of Denver with a similar population.
How is it that it seems like everything we did back then took a little more effort but life now still manages to be more difficult?
How is it that it seems like everything we did back then took a little more effort but life now still manages to be more difficult?
Just looked it up, didn't even know there was a Brownsville in WI! Moved to Tucson when I was 12 so didn't get around much in the Chicago area. We did travel to Milwaukee sometimes to visit my cousins.
If you're talking about USGS quad maps being updated near you only when there's a change, then count yourself lucky - that's more often than most. Most get updated every half-century or so! At that rate, not only is it unreliable to rely on them for road information, it's also unreliable to use them for historical research because features can appear and disappear between map editions, so they never appear on a map. The USGS doesn't revise them regularly because it's very costly to survey the 50 or so square miles that each map covers (except in Alaska, which is about 200 square miles each), so they aren't updated very often. The quad maps are survey-quality maps, but the MVUM are not, so they cost far less to produce.
Yes. Yes, it is. Even more reason to have paper maps and the skills to use them.
Case in point: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...llite-missiles-electronic-jammers-lasers.html
You do know where the signal used by GPS receivers comes from, right?
Neal
TJ Enthusiast
I fly for a living, the Feds require that I carry paper charts regardless of any electronic devices or apps that I may use. I'm also old enough that I learned to fly while navigating with a paper chart, a compass and a stopwatch. While I use my GPS and flight software every day (and happy to have 'em) it is good to know that I can pull out the paper chart, look out the window, figure out where I am and navigate to where I want to be with all electronic devices inoperative. Basic navigation (on land or in the air) with paper maps is always a good skill to have when you are out in the boonies, and New Mexico, where I do the majority of my flying, is 95% boonies.
@B1Toad, I have been amazed at the places I have spotted from the air in the area between Las Vegas and Santa Rosa along the Pecos and Gallinas Rivers, mostly old colonias from the Spanish/Mexican period. I once landed my helicopter in an area I could see old foundations (my photographer really needed to take a comfort break) and as he was doing his thing I wandered around the area and ended up in an old camposanto (graveyard) with headstones going back several hundred years, the newest dating to around 1898, all carved in the local sandstone with names and dates in Spanish. I'm a big history freak, so to me it was a big deal. People once lived and died here, raised families and built a town and no one even knows the name of the place now. All that history, all those lives and experiences, all of it lost to us. Makes me sad.
@B1Toad, I have been amazed at the places I have spotted from the air in the area between Las Vegas and Santa Rosa along the Pecos and Gallinas Rivers, mostly old colonias from the Spanish/Mexican period. I once landed my helicopter in an area I could see old foundations (my photographer really needed to take a comfort break) and as he was doing his thing I wandered around the area and ended up in an old camposanto (graveyard) with headstones going back several hundred years, the newest dating to around 1898, all carved in the local sandstone with names and dates in Spanish. I'm a big history freak, so to me it was a big deal. People once lived and died here, raised families and built a town and no one even knows the name of the place now. All that history, all those lives and experiences, all of it lost to us. Makes me sad.
Guys keep your old maps and tape them up. Lots of old trails and roads get left out in newer editions.
Last time i went to death valley some 30 year old maps from my grandparents led me to some beautiful places no other rigs were at!
Last time i went to death valley some 30 year old maps from my grandparents led me to some beautiful places no other rigs were at!
I was just there over Memorial day for our annual reunion. Some of those headstones you saw were probably my ancestors. They ended up in a town called Trementina which is now just flagstone ruins like in your picture. If you draw a triangle with one point in Santa Rosa, another in Tucumcari the 3rd point to the North would be near Trementina, just West of Conchas Reservoir. A little to the Northwest is the Scientology compound which I'm sure you've seen from the air. We hold our reunions at the old WPA schoolhouse where NM 104 junctions with NM 419.
I have ancestors buried all along the Gallinas river in each settlement along there, nothing left but ruins now. Most of the flagstone has been hauled away. If you go to this site: https://trementina1871.wordpress.com/ it is the history of Trementina. My 4th great aunt was the wife of the founder of the settlement. There is a lot of good documentation remaining about the history, so fortunately not all is lost.
Wonder if they are getting left out on purpose? I love Death Valley. Dante's View at night with the lights of LA in the distance some 200 miles away as the crow flies.
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It is probably intentional. Taking away trails one at a time is standard operations for park services everywhere
Neal
TJ Enthusiast
I'm familiar with Trementina, it's just north of a straight line between Conchas Lake and Albuquqerque. Thanks for the link, I'll look into it. I have also flown over many of the townsites along the Gallinas like La Liendre and Chaperito. I did a little more research on the area I showed in my post, it may have been called El Esteritos but I'm not completely convinced yet. It lies at the point where the Gallinas joins the Pecos. The Scientology place makes a convenient checkpoint when flying in the area, as does the Star Axis further to the west. Lots of interesting stuff out that way.
I hope to make it to La Liendre and Chaperito this summer and look for names on the headstones, unfortunately the flagstone headstones tend to melt over time and become illegible. There was a missionary who spent years at Trementina and helped to better the way of living including sanitation, and she quarantined the town during the flu epidemic or smallpox, I can't remember which, and nobody got sick. Her name was Alice Blake and I have a copy of her unpublished memoirs, nearly 300 pages, in which she speaks highly of my second great grandfather. I got a lot of my information from the Menaul Historical Library in Albuquerque.
When you flew over La Liendre and Chaperito were there any visible ruins?
When you start down off the mesa down into the valley the view is breathtaking, I can only imagine what it must look like from the air.
A story appeared in a ghost town magazine in 1973 and I was able to locate a copy of the magazine on ebay and made a pdf of the story (copyright expired January 2023)
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Neal
TJ Enthusiast
Both La Liendre and Chaperito appear to have at least a few visible ruins and both places have walled cemeteries as well. I can't say what access looks like for either place, but the Chaperito site in particular looks like it is on a working ranch. Shouldn't be too hard to sweet-talk your way onto the property...
I haven’t found this silk map of Germany too useful yet but maybe I will have to bail out of a B-17 at some point and be thankful for it.
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