It seems they made a change in late february and no longer have blm land as one of the options. (blm wilderness, blm rangeland, etc are still options) This makes it much less useful. They also dropped the national forest and state land overlays.
blarson wrote: What's wrong with the geocomunicator.gov web site I gave?
I just took a look at this on your repeated reccomendation. I guess it is pretty neat but an awful interface, as you pointed out. I looked at a difficult area that I am familiar with and found a 4WD trail that was 'killed' a long time ago. Anything on the TOPO view has to be researched accordingly because it is usually way out of date. The 'street' view showed nothing - - no trails. The satellite view is best but then I would just go back to GOOGLE EARTH (better interface). Still, a good find to keep an eye on to see how it develops. I would be hugely surprised if it ever got any recreation type information imbeded in it. You'd need some white knight from the outside who had access to the database for that to ever happen (and that isn't likeley).
If it is GPS coordinates that you crave, I might suggest the BACKCOUNTRY ADVENTURES series (see AMAZON.com). These are 1/4 ton vehicle trail guides mostly compiled by Peter Massey & Jeanne Wilson. But they tend to have been researched as much as ten years before the current date. Things change wickedly out there in that amount of time (wind, water, neglect, etc.). These guides exist for Arizona, Utah, California, Colorado... am I forgeting any ???
Because those guides are essentially written for Jeeps, the trail ratings should be taken with a grain of salt when you are a full sized pickup (maybe carrying a truck camper). Also, don't follow any GPS coordinates too blindly because you might steer yourself over a cliff - - things change quickly out there. I've been on established trails that are so washed out that I didn't know half the time if I was close to the trail or not. To my way of thinking, the MASSEY guides are a basis for enticing one to do further research. They mention possible distributed campsites but, again, sometimes these features are deliberatly 'killed' by the authorities so they might not be there by the time you get there. But, it is the spirit of the thing. GOOGLE EARTH will show obvioulsy good oportunities for camp sites. The satellite information is, again, kind of old but at least you can take down coordinates of places that look good.
blarson wrote: What's wrong with the geocomunicator.gov web site I gave?
I just took a look at this on your repeated reccomendation. I guess it is pretty neat but an awful interface, as you pointed out. I looked at a difficult area that I am familiar with and found a 4WD trail that was 'killed' a long time ago. Anything on the TOPO view has to be researched accordingly because it is usually way out of date. The 'street' view showed nothing - - no trails. The satellite view is best but then I would just go back to GOOGLE EARTH (better interface). Still, a good find to keep an eye on to see how it develops. I would be hugely surprised if it ever got any recreation type information imbeded in it. You'd need some white knight from the outside who had access to the database for that to ever happen (and that isn't likeley).
I'm considering importing the blm boundaries into openstreetmap, but I don't expect them to be displayed on the default map. (As most US federal data, the blm data is public domain.) The openstreetmap database is available under a free licence, and it is posible to create maps (online, printed, garmin gps, ...) with whatever you want on them. The tools to do so are gradually improving, but still arn't easy to use. Most of the streets in the US are from the census beuro, and the quality of that data in many areas is low. However, anyone can fix such problems and add things like hiking trails, campgrounds, and pretty much anything that can be seen on the ground. Bing and Yahoo let us use their imagery to edit the map.
blarson wrote: What's wrong with the geocomunicator.gov web site I gave?
I just took a look at this on your repeated reccomendation. I guess it is pretty neat but an awful interface, as you pointed out. I looked at a difficult area that I am familiar with and found a 4WD trail that was 'killed' a long time ago. Anything on the TOPO view has to be researched accordingly because it is usually way out of date. The 'street' view showed nothing - - no trails. The satellite view is best but then I would just go back to GOOGLE EARTH (better interface). Still, a good find to keep an eye on to see how it develops. I would be hugely surprised if it ever got any recreation type information imbeded in it. You'd need some white knight from the outside who had access to the database for that to ever happen (and that isn't likeley).
I'm considering importing the blm boundaries into openstreetmap, but I don't expect them to be displayed on the default map. (As most US federal data, the blm data is public domain.) The openstreetmap database is available under a free licence, and it is posible to create maps (online, printed, garmin gps, ...) with whatever you want on them. The tools to do so are gradually improving, but still arn't easy to use. Most of the streets in the US are from the census beuro, and the quality of that data in many areas is low. However, anyone can fix such problems and add things like hiking trails, campgrounds, and pretty much anything that can be seen on the ground. Bing and Yahoo let us use their imagery to edit the map.
Interface is not as nice as Google Earth but newer high resolution aerial/satellite imagery along with other map features is available.
blarson you might consider looking at Open Source GIS programs if you want to work with GIS layers(data) available from Government online wepages. Government GIS data is typically found in two formats either ESRI-Shapefile and or ArcInfo Exchange Files(Coverage). These both are multi-component file groups that are not handled by most mainstream software programs. This will allow using imagery as a backdrop to the GIS data.
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