Trek Himachal

One of the major issues with trekking in Himachal is the lack of quality maps. All those easily available in print are

1. Old and outdated or
2. Outright wrong or
3. At very low zoom levels or
4. All of the above

Over the last couple of years, I have made some attempts at setting this right. So, OSM does have some half decent maps. The camp sites are marked correctly, the passes are marked, there are streams and the trail is there. However, lets be honest, this has been far from enough. The major issue with OSM maps has been the lack of contour lines. Recently though, a friend of mine brought to my attention the Open Cycle Map. Its an open source map, a sister project of OSM (so to say) which uses the database of the Open Street Map but renders it over contour lines and renders it in a way that makes it friendly for trekking maps. This, to a large extent solves the problem. It has contour lines for all of Himachal and therefore puts the trails and rivers I have mapped in perspective. If you can read contours, you can see ridges, mountain ranges, depressions and also get a fair idea of the gradient you will have to climb up or down. So, in short, this is a blessing. I am attaching below an image from Open Cycle Map for the Lam Dal and Kali Kund area. The blue streak heading North West from the two water bodies is the Baleni stream and the elegance with which you can see the contours congregating at the stream basin is beautiful. Now this is what a trekking map should look like.

The double awesome news is complemented with walking papers, it forms a complete hiking map tool. At walking papers, you can choose a particular frame at any zoom level on a map, choose a renderer (e.g. plain OSM maps or Open Cycle Map) and then convert these frames to printable PDFs in various sizes (A3, A4) and orientation (letter, landscape, portrait), with or without grid lines. Over and above that, if you need each portion to be detailed, you can have the PDFs in sheets of 2X2 or 4X4. Finally but not the most important, the pdf also has an autogenerated QR code on the right bottom. If you have a camera cell with GPRS and a QR code reading software installed, you can click a photograph of the QR code and your phone will automatically load you onto the relevant map and navigate for you. Anyway, this feature is mostly useless for hikes because cell network service does not reach most remote places.

I will soon be replacing all the map links on this site with Open Cycle Map links and also upload PDFs for sections of treks. For the first time in the last 2 years, I feel my effort in mapping these trails has been justified, thanks to Open Cycle Map and Walking Papers.