A Guide to Customizing Your Topographic Map

Maps can be an incredibly valuable asset for anyone exploring and recreating in the outdoors. Topographical maps provide a bird’s-eye view of the area you’ll be traveling through, offering insights into terrain features, waterways, and potential travel routes.

One common challenge individuals face is knowing how to obtain a map for their specific operational area, but here at Coalcracker, we can help.

We’ve been using maps from MyTopo for years, and they’ve been extremely beneficial for us. MyTopo offers standard USGS maps, along with the ability to customize your map to fit your exact area, size, and scale.

Use this link https://findamap.mytopo.com/findamap?ref=Coalcracker to explore their map builder, or you can set up an appointment with them for assistance.

Some recommendations we have when building your map:

Always consider your home base location. For example, the Appalachian Bushman School property. When we build a map to show our operational area, we place the school property at the far right edge of the map (eastern side). This is because we operate from the school building to the west. We never operate east of the building, as that direction leads to houses and roads. If we centered the school building on the map, half of it would be useless to us.

Another example is my personal map for emergency planning. My house, shop, and school property can all fit on one map, so I don’t have a central point. The goal is to scale the map to fit each of the three important locations. With that in mind, please consider the scale of the map. If you choose a scale that’s too large or too small, it can distort your understanding of the area or cause you to lose important features on the map.

Map Guidelines (be sure to keep the above in mind):

• Map Type: USGS Topographic
• Scale: 1:24,000
• Latitude/Longitude Coordinate Grid: Place Lat/Lon tick marks at regular intervals
• No UTM/MGRS Grid (unless you're prior military and prefer it)
• Size: 24x36 or 18x24. We prefer 18x24 if we could choose.
• Get your map folded! You’ll thank us later!