Hiking maps are off course essential for planning a trip. While in the old days you had to buy a paper map first before you could start with planning your trip in detail, today you can already start planning your trip entirely from your computer screen for many regions in the world. Today the Internet is a fantastic resource for a wide variety of maps suitable for hiking:
- Sheets of topographic maps readily downloadable in JPG, TIF or PDF-format and ready to print, usually paying but some are also available for free
- Interactive topographic maps can be consulted in a geographical application on your screen
- Base maps for use on a GPS device
- Interactive topographic maps of specific countries or regions:
- USA and Canada on Mappingsupport: very great tool!
- USA onlinetopomaps
- USA mytopo
- USA Maptech mapserver
- Atlas of Canada shows a basic topographic map. Here you can search for the specific sheet number of 250k and 50k topographic maps and download the preferred scanned topographic map sheets directly from the Natural Resources Canada download directory.
- Svalbard and Jan Mayen
- Iceland
- Norway GodTur with altitude profile function and more
- Norway with indication of types of mountain huts and DNT-huts
- Norway Norgeskart
- Norway FINN kart with layer of aerial photographs
- Sweden
- Sweden Länskartor choose the best screen resolution and then search by province and municipality
- Swedish Fjällkartan
- Finland Retkikartta
- Finland
- Estonia
- Lithuania
- UK with login to access 25k topographic maps
- UK
- UK where’s the path?
- UK Ordnance Survey maps on Bing map
- Ireland with a very basic topographic map layer
- Netherlands
- Belgium
- Grand Duchy of Luxembourg
- France, Corsica and French overseas isles by Géoportail has an aerial photograph layer and whole Switzerland is also covered by a separate topographic map layer
- Germany, Switzerland, Austria and part of the Italian Alps by Outdooractive, has also a huge database of possible hikes, bike tours, ski tours,…
- Germany with first class information about long distance trails
- Bavaria
- Switzerland
- Austria
- Poland
- Czech Republic
- Czech Republic alternative option
- Czech Republic yet another option
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
- Slovenia other option
- Croatia with layer of aerial photographs
- Romania supplemented by a few trails in Google maps
- Russia with global coverage in satellite images and a basic map, especially interesting for the unique geotagged photo collection over Russia
- Portugal and isles
- Algarve
- Spain
- Spain other option
- Galicia
- Basque country
- Catalonia
- Andorra
- Italy
- Peter’s Maps has several interactive maps for some European countries
- New Zealand
- South-Africa
- This Czech list contains many topographic maps from various corners over the world.
- Wanderreitkarte is a source for hiking trails and long distance trails in some European countries.
- TopoMapper concerns another source for an almost global coverage in topographic maps. Australia, USA, Canada, and the coastal areas of Greenland are covered by national or local map sources. The rest of the world is covered by old Soviet military topographic maps (which are unfortunately not always that accurate). This link can be helpful to better read the Soviet Maps. New Zealand and Antarctica are not covered.
- ArcGIS Explorer is an online GIS application by Esri where you can find a wide variety of maps from a community of users. By registering you can even make and edit your own maps and share them with the world if you like. For a complete understanding of the application and how to browse the maps, use the help function. The entire USA and New Zealand are covered in detailed topographic maps. To find them, type in the search bar in the right upper corner one of the following names to find one specific map:
- USA Topo Maps or
- ArcGIS Online USA Topographic Maps
- New Zealand Topographic Basemap (LINZ)
When planning a trackless hiking expedition in a remote region where detailed maps are hard to find or nonexistent, the following maps in ArcGIS Explorer might also be of value beside the Soviet military maps in Topomapper or any other topographic map. The topographic maps in ArcGIS Explorer only show elevation contours, hydrology and some basic ground cover information for most part of the world. The satellite images give a better idea about ground and vegetation cover. These composite multispectral Landsat images have a resolution of 15m and are sometimes a better source for the few Landsat images that still have lower resolution or cloud cover for a few places in Google Earth, Google Maps, Bing Map and many other sources (although these images are not completely free of cloud cover either):
- ArcGIS Online World Topographic Map or
- Topgraphic
- MDA NaturalVue Satellite Imagery