This is going to be a continuation of the rockhounding guide series.
In today's video I'm going to be talking about a free resource that you can utilize for planning your trips.
We'll be specifically looking at National Forests.
Which, you can see here on the map is in that more dark green color.
So this really only applies to the United States.
So if you're in Canada, sorry, maybe you have a similar resource.
But, the majority of the National Forests in the United States are located in the western US, so
sorry Midwest and East Coasters. You have a lot less National Forests and public lands in general.
The U.S. Forest Service, they do a really good job of mapping their forests.
And that's kind of what we're gonna be talking about today.
You can buy topographical maps of pretty much every single National Forest.
They cost anywhere from ten to fifteen dollars, which they're a great resource, It's a nice big map.
But most often you can just get by with these free ones.
So we're just gonna pick an area like here in
Idaho perhaps and we'll just zoom in and you'll kind of see the map starts to
populate more and more and you can see all of these different
national forests and the corresponding topographical map.
So uh, it's really easy and you can just click on one of these squares here like, uh, Square Top here.
You can click on Square Top and you can see that you can download the PDF file.
And doing so will pop open a new window and/or you can download it to your hard drive,
transfer it over to your phone,
transfer it over to a tablet that you're gonna bring with you.
These are 7.5 minute topographical maps for those that care about that.
And as you can see, this is a high quality map that is free.
One of the things that they do really well here, if you look down in the legend.
The legend on these maps is really nice. They will tell you the quality of the road, which is really important.
I mean, most people do not have a lifted Jeep rolling on 37's. You can't just go anywhere.
So, knowing if the road is going to be dirt, gravel, paved, you know.
What? What is it? Is it a trail on the map?
I particularly like the is it suitable for passenger cars or do you need a high clearance vehicle?
It's very good that they distinguish between those two on these maps.
So now we're just looking south of Helena, Montana.
And uh, we'll open up uh the Crow Creek Falls map here and you can see that these are
all the same. They're very uniform. It's also nice if you choose to print them out,
if you have a color printer,
that down here at the bottom
you can see that they also list a legend of the corresponding maps to the north east south and west.
So it makes it very simple for planning your rockhounding trips.
Anyways, I wanted to share this excellent free resource with you so that you can utilize some of this time and
plan a good rockhounding trip. So as always I appreciate the views
There is a whole playlist here available of videos like this where I share rockhounding tips, so...
Thanks.