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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good map, with room for improvement on the supplemental material,
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This review is from: Trails Illustrated Great Smoky Mountains National Park (Trails Illustrated - Topo Maps USA) (Map)
Like the other entries in the Trails Illustrated series, this map combines topographical maps, updated information about trails and campgrounds, and background information about the park. It's essential for planning your hikes, though at a relatively large scale.
Great Smoky Mountains NP is a complicated place, with a high trail density. This map helps you navigate part of this, color-coding different types of backcountry campgrounds such as shelters, reservation-required, and no-reservation sites. Oddly, horse-only sites are not coded separately. Horse-only and mixed horse/hiker trails are both dashed orange lines, which makes it hard to distinguish them although they are of (slightly) different widths. The result is that some hikers may be surprised by the horse traffic on their itineraries. However, the high trail density means that there are a large number of possible itineraries, combining pieces of trails into short or long day hikes, short or long overnights, and so forth. Unlike many other maps in the series, this map provides relatively little guidance in selecting trails -- you are more or less on your own. There are a lot of entry points into the park, and some trail suggestions organized by entry would have been helpful. The map also fails to control one of the challenges of the park's spatial layout. The park is a long oval, and the map organizes this by putting the "west side" on one side of the map, the "east side" on the other. This uses the map space efficiently, and would be useful for Appalachian Trail hikers, who usually go from west to east. However, many day hikers will stay in a base on either the *north* side (Tennessee) or the *south* side (North Carolina), and the major highway through the park falls more or less on the boundary between the east and west sides. This means that many day hikers will have to flip back and forth between the front and back of the map. Backpackers doing most out-and-backs or loop hikes may also find frustrations here, since they are likely to begin at low elevation, hike up to the crest, and then come back down -- again, their mental space is organized north/south while the map is organized east/west. Of course, I don't have any brilliant solutions to this problem, but then, I'm not a mapmaker, either.
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