National Geographic, Trails Illustrated, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, USA (Trails Illustrated - Topo Maps USA) [Folded Map, Illustrated] [Map]

Trails Illustrated (Editor)

Product Details

• Map
• Publisher: Trails Illustrated; Map edition (January 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0925873004
• ISBN-13: 978-0925873002
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 4.1 x 0.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,712,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful but not perfect map, May 25, 2008

By 

Arthur Digbee (Indianapolis, IN, USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: National Geographic, Trails Illustrated, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, USA (Trails Illustrated - Topo Maps USA) (Map)

I'm a big fan of the Trails Illustrated series, and I always buy the TI map for every park I visit. They show the roads and (except at a very large scale such as Yellowstone) all the trails. Each one is a topographical map, which tells me what I want to know about elevations and, to some extend, ground cover. Each map also includes light information about the park, contacts, recommended books, and commonly includes some information about backcountry regulations. Every map comes in foldable brochure format, and will fit in a shirt or pants pocket.

This one certainly does all that. Each map also has its own quirks.

Quirk #1 here is that it divides the park into a North Side and a South Side. That fits everything into a single brochure, but it's not great graphical design. Mentally, the park divides into an East Side (Estes Park) and a West Side (Grand Lake), connected by Trail Ridge Road. Trail Ridge Road shows up on both sides of the map, in its entirety on the North Side, and in pieces on the South Side. The main tourist destination, the Bear Lake-Fern Lake area, is found in its entirety on the South Side and in pieces on the North Side.

A second quirk is that the roads in the park (except for Trail Ridge) are printed in a very light, skinny line, while the paved roads appear as heavy dark lines and the trails appear as heavy dashed lines. This makes the trails jump out at the eye, while the roads are hard to find and follow. Since you probably use the roads to get to the trails, that's awkward.

The third quirk is that the map doesn't show the two shuttle bus systems (Bear Lake and Fern Lake). These have been around, largely unchanged, for a couple decades, so there's no real excuse not to include them. The bus lines are very important for hikers because they make it possible to hike one-way trips and get back to your car (or to Estes Park, using a third bus).

It's still an essential map.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Very useful for hikers, July 20, 2007

By 

bukhtan (Chicago, Illinois, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: National Geographic, Trails Illustrated, Rocky Mountain National Park, Colorado, USA (Trails Illustrated - Topo Maps USA) (Map)

[This is a duplicate of the review found underneath another Amazon token of this product, at that place listed as available through Trail Explorers Outpost.]
Anyone visiting RMNP, doing any substantial hiking at all, will be well served by this product. There are some defects, however: as is the case with so many of the Trails Illustrated maps, the contours have been obscured with a wash that impresses upon the user that the terrain is marked by terrific relief, seemingly superfluous for those accustomed to reading contour maps. Also, there are not many benchmarks, and contour labels can be hard to find, but, with some effort, you'll discover your location and elevation on this map. It's a two-sided thing ,with the two halves, north and south, upside down to each other, so it flips effortlessly while you fight wind, sweat, sunglasses etc. Most of the space is taken up with actual map, rather than the advice on trails that Nat'l Geo likes to hand out. Still, there's some stuff to read on bighorn sheep and marmots, if you like to read out in such places.
It's pretty much to the scale appropriate for those who hike the well-maintained trails of RMNP; however, if you want to go OFF-trail, I'd recommend the appropriate USGS topos or some direct derivative of them. All the more so if you're climbing (although an intrepid fellow I met on the Boulder Field underneath Long's Peak said he hadn't used a map for twenty years; and, come to think of it, Major JW Powell didn't have a map, either).