Free PDF downloads of printable canoe maps for the entire Boundary Waters and Quetico, rendered using Caltopo.

canoemaps.com

Been home printing maps for decades, I'd suggest a waterproof synthetic inkjet paper for printing at home. Waterproof Paper over laminating. Have used Nat Geo Adventure Paper in the past now settled on IGuage 8mil. Very waterproof and run free can be written on with common pencil or pen, almost rip proof. I used printed maps as shower mats for a week to check the durability, passed with flying colors that neither smudged, faded, or ran.

I use high quality print settings with high resolution paper style, print on both sides of the paper. Test print on common paper and common settings to check formats and layouts.

Laminated prior to finding waterproof print media, the IGuage I now use is much more versatile and long lasting, while less expensive.

butthead

Thanks, Butthead! Great tip. I'll add a note about weatherproof paper. Any other advice to share, or comments on the maps? You seem to be the resident GPS expert. I used some of the GPX files you shared in compiling these maps.

Peter,.
Nice job - thanks for sharing!

Looks like your doing fine. I tend to use Delorme and Garmin USGS, but those share the basics of CalTopo. Keep it up!

butthead

Thank you for this giant contribution to the community!

Is there a way to provide a link to a map legend? I recognize the Pagami Creek Fire extent and the PMA boundaries, but they will be a mystery to many. ;-)

Kelso: "Free PDF downloads of printable canoe maps for the entire Boundary Waters and Quetico, rendered using Caltopo.

canoemaps.com "

Supercool. That's really good stuff!

Thank you for sharing. These are great.

Very impressive and I like the call to donate to BWCA.com.

Any chance of two more maps south of your Farm Lake map. That would cover the rest of White Iron and the rivers south of it. Yes, not BWCA but a popular chain of lakes.

This is fascinating! I literally just last week was reading some old threads about custom printing maps and was just starting to do more research on print options. What timing! I was thinking of making some custom maps for WCPP.

Look in the GPS Forum, Google Earth overlays
You can orient a paper map as an image overlay in Google Earth, save and print it from a variety of mapping programs, I like Garmin Basecamp.


butthead

Thanks for the kind words and suggestions. I've already put more time into this project than I originally intended, but I will begin a list of planned future updates.

- Fire perimeter and PMA labeling: I agree that the fire perimeters and PMAs are often poorly labeled. I will think about practical ways to address this.

- Lakes south of Fall Lake: I will start compiling a list of potential additions in the Quetico-Superior surrounding area. Any others?

- Google earth overlays: Google maps and imagery have copyright protections limiting their distribution. I have opted not to use any Google mapping products in these maps. My intent here is to create printable paper map PDFs. I don't have plans to create Garmin or other GPS overlay files, although I'm willing to host such data created by others.

- Portages: Presently only portages longer than ~100r are labeled with their length. Eventually I want to get all the portage lengths labeled. There's a known bug in the Caltopo software itself causing these labels to be suppressed in the PDFs.

- Points of interest: Points of interest such as pictographs are not currently shown. I do want to add those eventually.

- Verification: None of the maps have been verified by on-the-ground scouting. If someone visits an area I would be interested to hear reports of map accuracy.

- Additional parks and regions: At this time I do not plan to render canoe maps of additional parks and regions, but if someone else does the leg work I will host the files for download. Jaywalker, if you are interested in doing something for Woodland Caribou, please email me at peter@canoemaps.com.

Kelso:
- Fire perimeter and PMA labeling: I agree that the fire perimeters and PMAs are often poorly labeled. I will think about practical ways to address this."

One free and practical way is by adding the relevant data layers in a map generated with QGIS .

Here's a quick and dirty example of what can be done with QGIS (or any other capable GIS app). I went a bit overboard on the frequency of labelling the fire perimeter, for the benefit of my trip companions:

Fuhgeddaboud QGIS for the time being. It appears that CalTopo (which I don't use) has a way to label layers:

CalTopo Config Menu

Gravelroad: Thanks for the tip about QGIS. You're right, I can do the same in Caltopo, by converting perimeter polygons to tracks. This forces the PDF output to show the labels along the perimeter, instead of at the midpoint of the polygon. However, this means that I must re-render all of the relevant PDFs, a very time-consuming task. I may choose to add labels with a PDF editor or leave them as-is.

Hey Kelso - this is fantastic! Can I ask about your process - did you put all the portages and campsites in manually, or was there a digital source you used?

My starting point was Butthead's gpx compilation. From there I manually added and tweaked, especially the labeling and portage data. My main contribution has been to render all the maps as PDFs, catalog them, and make them distributable.

Sweet! Thanks so much for providing these!!

Update: I created a 94x48 inch wall map from the dataset, which is now available for download at canoemaps.com . This wall map covers the entire BWCA and Quetico and includes some map data corrections as well as the addition of all known pictograph sites within the BWCA/Quetico.

If anyone gets this wall map printed, let me know how it turns out.

Kelso: If anyone gets this wall map printed, let me know how it turns out."

Hey, just wanted to express many thanks for making this map. I've read through hundreds of these forums and decided it was time to make an account so I could reply.

With plenty of free time recently, I was able to create and finish the 94'' x 48'' wall map. Thank you for all the work it must have taken to create these files. It made the actual making of the map so much easier!

I do my own maps something like this too. Generally though only for my desired route. Which is how I can tell you've put an extraordinary amount of time and effort into this project. I'm impressed and gobsmacked.

Glad these maps are seeing some use!

Just got an addition to my printing gear, aimed at larger photo prints at home but very adaptable to this topic. A wide 13x19 inch page A3 capable inkjet printer.
first printing from it a 13x19 and a 8.5x11 printed on a Canon Pixma iX6820, $150 range, inkjet printer.
Waiting on Photo paper but a 500 sheet HR pack cost me $20. I can make some maps now! These were quick samples from BaseCamp but will work on some from Kelso (Thanks!).

butthead