I originally made maps to avoid hauling a bunch of quadrangles around the backcountry and making a mess of them everytime I went out. I offer them on the website to go with each adventure, to show where the route goes. DISCLAIMER: they might be accurate, they might not. Use them at your own risk.

I have two kinds of maps available:

• Tom's Canyoneering USA Mini-Guides are map-guides to many different adventures. They are designed to be printed on my 13" x 19" printer, and are available at the Canyoneering USA Store. Since the original files are about 8 megabytes, I have made reduced-size copies available for download. All available maps are listed at the Map Download Center; and I list them on the area index pages, and on each applicable hike.

• Other, less polished maps are on the website with each hike. For many hikes, the small map on the webpage links to a larger map that can be downloaded and printed. How you print them depends on your available resources. I import maps into Photoshop and print them. If you don't have an Image Editing program, you can download a trial copy of Paintshop Pro at ZD Net. Printing from your browser will produce only low-resolution images.

Most printers have a resolution of either 300 dpi or 360 dpi. If your printer is not a 360 dpi printer like mine, you might get better results if you re-size the image to 300 dpi or whatever works with your printer. Many of my maps are set up at 180 dpi and to fit on a 8-1/2" x 11" piece of papter.

Here's the map printing sequence:

1. From the individual hike window, click on the small map or text link to bring up the big map. The big map is about 400 kB.

2. Right-click on the big map, and saveas to your "Canyoneering" directory.

3. Open the big map in Photoshop, Photoshop LE or a similar image editting program.

4. If your printer is not a 360 dpi printer, resize the image (using the Image Size function) to 300 dpi, keeping the length of the map the same (usually 10"). After resizing, you may want to use the sharpness filter.

5. Print Map from Photoshop. If necessary, adjust the lightness and the contrast for better readability with your printer.

To print the text, rather than printing from your browser, copy the text to Notepad to strip off all the formatting information. From Notepad, copy and paste into a Word Processor, and make it pretty for printing.

Good luck.