The NSW government (Australia) makes its excellent digital topographic maps freely available. Those topographic maps will be adequate for most purposes. However, bushwalkers and canyoners who walk off-track in areas with complex topography, such as the “pagoda country” of the Northern Blue Mountains, might be able to use more detail than is provided on the standard topographic maps.
If you are a bushwalker or canyoner wanting more detailed maps of the Blue Mountains, you’ve come to the right place. This site provides topographic maps of the Blue Mountains with additional detail to facilitate off-track navigation. Access to the maps is unrestricted. You don’t need to register, subscribe, look at advertising junk, or pay a fee. I don’t collect your data. There are no catches!
About the maps
Map names correspond to those used in the NSW Government’s 1:25,000 topographic map series.
Two formats are available:
Image files (*.png). You can open these files with any image viewer. The files are quite large (typically 100 to 400 Mb) so most cannot be viewed in a web browser. If you can view them in your browser, they will display at low resolution. To view files in full resolution, save them to your device and then view the saved file with an image viewer such as the Photos app in Windows. The image files are most useful for planning trips
CLICK HERE TO BE DIRECTED TO A FOLDER CONTAINING IMAGE FILES.
Memory-Map files (*.qct). Geo-tagged files made for use in the Memory-Map navigation app. The Memory-Map files are useful for navigation.
CLICK HERE TO BE DIRECTED TO A FOLDER CONTAINING MEMORY-MAP FILES.
The files are served up by DropBox but you do not need to have a DropBox account to view or save the files.
The maps are constructed by superimposing high-resolution (LIDAR) elevation data onto the standard 1:25,000 topographic maps. An example is shown in the image (the grid has a 1km spacing.) The original contour lines appear as smudged pink lines. The high-resolution elevation data are used to generate additional contour lines at 5m intervals: they are shown as thin black lines. The 100m contours are shown as thin, bright pink lines. High-resolution elevation data are also used to calculate slopes. Slopes of 45-60 degrees (very steep) are rendered with a semi-opaque red, and slopes of greater than 60 degrees (cliffs) are rendered in black.
Please send feedback about the maps or web site to me at me[AT]rherbert.net.
Copyright information
These maps are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Under this licence you are free to share and adapt material as long as appropriate credit is provided and you indicate if changes were made. You cannot legally restrict anyone from doing what the licence permits.
Refer to these maps as ‘Rob’s maps, https://rherbert.info/maps.’
The maps were constructed by overlaying high-resolution (LIDAR) elevation data on topographic maps. Both the elevation data and the topographic maps have been made available under a CC 4.0 license:
Topographic maps. © State of New South Wales (Spatial Services, a business unit of the Department of Customer Service NSW). For current information go to spatial.nsw.gov.au.
Elevation data. Source: https://elevation.fsdf.org.au by Geoscience Australia which is © Commonwealth of Australia and is provided under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Licence and is subject to the disclaimer of warranties in section 5 of that license.