I am having a very hard time finding any sort of website that will allow me to find trailheads or trails without having to go directly to individual state park or national park websites. Even these lack trail information most of the time.

Is there a website or source people use to find these? I am looking for something other than having to buy individual maps simply for looking.

I use the National Park Service web site a lot. At the top level, it can help you find a national park near home or in whichever state you have interest. Then that can take you to the web site of that specific national park. Most of the national park web sites have a View Map button right there.

Now, in some cases you can view the park map on the screen, and if you try to print it out, some funny things happen with aspect ratio. In other cases you can view the park map and print out the PDF right there. Most of these are the general road maps of the park.

If you require a detailed topo map, you can get those from the USGS web site. However, few of these are of an entire park at once, at least for the larger parks. In most cases that I've seen, you can download a half-dozen quadrangle maps that should cover your area of operation. In some cases, these quad maps are of the twenty-year-old format, and in other cases, these quad maps are of the new format which appear more like satellite photos with topo features added in.

That is still likely to require you to overlay your own trail information on the quad map. If that is insufficient, then you need to purchase topo maps of the park, and there are several companies who publish those. Figure on $10-12 a pop.

--B.G.--

My problem is not finding the trails in the National parks. The nearest one is 8 hours away. My problem is finding trails on other lands such as National Recreation or Wild Life areas. These have little to no information, no general map to buy, and no sure way of knowing if a trail is there. For a lot of the State Parks in my area there is the same problem.

Anthony,

Give this a try, http://www.localhikes.com/

Put in your zip code as a starter

Edited by Trout on 06/03/2011 07:40:48 MDT.

Localhikes.com is a no go for me. So are a lot of other sites. I am looking for things mainly in Minnesota due to where I live. South Dakota and North Dakota would work too but on the East side of the states I would say that would be hard to find.