Web sites (primary)
- San Francisco
Bay Area Hiker
- Trail descriptions and reviews. Curated by Jan
Huber, each hike includes location of the trail head,
summary of the hike, detailed dtscriptions, and
photographs. Trail heads are shown as markers on a
Google map and organized in several searchable lists.
The site is well indexed by Google.
- BayNature
-
-
I only recently discovered this site and I'm still
learning it's in and outs. The Trailfinder
allows you to search by length, difficulty, and
features. Searches can be constrained by distance from
a location. The site is very polished.
- gmap-pedometer.com
-
This site lets you draw a track on a Google Map and
provides information on the distance and elevation
covered. Very useful while trying to figure out a
new hike or a variation on one a documented hike.
This started as a simple mashup showing some of the
cool functionality enabled by the Google Maps API.
However, recent changes have cluttered the layout to
make room for ads and the site can now be difficult to
use on a small (laptop) display.
-
TopOSM
-
This is a relief-shaded topographic map of the US overlayed with
geographic data from the
OpenStreetMap project.
I prefer this site to the Google Maps Terrain layer for its shading,
clearer contour lines, and higher zoom levels.
-
OpenCycleMap
-
The Landscape layer at this site is my second favorite for on-line
topographic maps. The geographic data is also from the
OpenStreetMap project.
A particular advantage of the
OpenCycleMap
is that it covers the whole world and not just the US. Off setting
that is that it has a lower elevation resolution than
TopOSM. Note that the contour
lines and elevation marks are in meters.
Web sites (less used)
These links are sites that I have used in the past, use
intermittently, or simple note for future use.
- EveryTrail
-
I was really excited by this site when it first
appeared. It is well integrated with an Android app
and it is easy to document your hike with uploaded
photos. However, when it changed to using Adobe Flash,
I largely quit using it.
The site is still useful for finding hikes and the
guides can be quite detailed and informative.
- 450 Hikes in
Bay Area, California
-
This site purports to be A comprehensive guide to
hikes for every season and my initial reaction
is that it meets its goal. The hikes are organized
into categories that make it easy to browse for an
interesting hike. I haven't used this site much,
probably because it does not produce a lot of hits to
my Google search patterns.