New Maps And Guides Will Get You There

Things change.

Old trails are lost, new ones are built, clearcuts are hacked out of the forest, roads are rerouted, streams are dammed and humans unleash bulldozers on hundreds of square miles every year in the Northwest.

So if you think your 1967 Kaniksu National Forest map will still get you around the Selkirk Mountains without a hitch, you’re dreaming.

Updating maps and guidebooks is a never-ending task. New and revised editions never seem to come out soon enough. But when they do, they are good news to backcountry explorers.

Locally, the 1995 Spokane County Recreation Map produced and sold in town by Northwest Map and Travel Service, shows public land designations, trails and other recreation information never before compiled on one map.

Incidentally, Northwest Map and Travel, at 525 W. Sprague, carries the area’s broadest selection of maps and guidebooks, including most items mentioned here.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s Spokane office has published an excellent map showing public lands of the channeled scablands in Lincoln County. Much of this public land has been secured in the past few years.

Several new or revised maps have been released for national forests in the Northwest, including the Wenatchee and Gallatin national forests and the Welcome Creek Wilderness on the Lolo National Forest of Montana.

National Forest maps as well as U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps are available for $4 through Forest Service ranger stations and from the Earth Science Information Center in the Post Office at 904 W. Riverside Ave.

Trails Illustrated, publisher of excellent national park and wilderness maps, has new releases for Wrangell-St. Elias Park in Alaska, Canyonlands Park in Utah and the Cloud Peak Wilderness in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains.

Revised Trails Illustrated maps for Glacier and Olympic national parks were released last year.

A revised edition of “100 Hikes in the Inland Northwest,” the guidebook written by this reporter and Ida Rowe Dolphin, is making its way to bookstore shelves this spring. (Look for the 1996 copyright.) The book features updated material on 60 of the 250 pages.

Also published this winter by The Mountaineers of Seattle is the 1997 edition of Washington’s Backcountry Almanac, a valuable guide to information about national parks, national forests and wilderness areas.

The handy booklet is available for $5.95 in bookstores or directly from the publisher by calling (800) 553-4453.

The Forest Service no longer publishes a specific map for the Eagle Cap Wilderness in Oregon. But Imus Geographics of Oregon has filled the gap with an improved shaded topo version on a 1:100,000 scale.

Gem Trek Publishing has produced several new maps for hikers and campers heading to British Columbia parks, including Banff and Kananaskis Country.

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