Street Atlas USA
Doug and all,
I just gained a new respect for DeLorme's Street Atlas USA and related
programs. Rudy Tschernich (author of Zeolites of the World) called today and
told me that he has been using Street Atlas in conjunction with "Map Expert"
which is an overlay program allowing one to make notes on an overlay to the
maps of Street Atlas. One can also draw in side roads, trails, pits, etc. to
make your mineral localities. He said that Street Atlas has the same detail as
the state "Atlas & Gazeteers" except there are no contour lines. I've noticed
that the atlases have fairly good detail of back roads and features (few
trails). One can enter the GPS location data and Map Expert will plot the
location on the overlay.
This appears to be a pretty good system for plotting/recording mineral
localities. Especially with the ability to draw in locality info and tie the
locality to the lat/lon from GPS. Also, you can go along a route, clicking on
points turnoffs etc. and it will calculate the mileage. Unfortunately for me,
Map Expert is not available for the Mac. Also, he has been using Global
Explorer which is a map atlas of the world. It has pretty good detail, but not
quite as good as Street Atlas and is actually designed for the traveler with
airline routes and the like.
Along this same line of thinking: I just received (love Christmas!) the Atlas
and Gazeteer of Washington and find it much better than Idaho. Idaho is at
1:250,000 scale and does not have sections, T&R indicated. Washington is at
1:150,000 and has sections and T&R. This larger scale makes the Washington
Atlas a larger book (119 maps as compared to 63 for Idaho) and individual
sections are over 3/8 inch across at that scale. Pretty good detail, hope they
redo Idaho!
Lannyh