Bulkley Valley Topographic Mapping

The classic 1:50,000 topographic maps from Natural Resources Canada are every hiker's friend. Unfortunately, in our area they have not been updated since the 1990s, or in some cases not since 1975. They have also become difficult to find.

For example, below on the left is the Twin Falls area as shown on the 093L/14 quadrangle, dated 1975; and on the right as it is today, with its recreation site and trails.


Maps on phones are popular, but as another option for outdoorspeople I have made a new series of printed topographic maps of the upper Bulkley Valley using current data.  They are for sale on a print-on-demand basis at Bulkley Valley Printers in Smithers.

The maps are at 1:35,000 scale, and 165 sheets cover the entire area of the old 093L quadrangle. (This includes most of the mountains and lakes typically visited from Smithers, Telkwa and Houston. See the  index to mapsheets, below.)

They are printed on 11" x 17" paper, so each map covers an area about 9 km x 14 km. Print-on-demand means you buy only the map sheets that you want. Each map will be $8 if printed on 24 lb bond, or $12 printed on 6 mil synthetic (a paper that is weatherproof/waterproof).


Some of the features of this series include:


Shaded relief
The shaded relief is based on the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission around the year 2000. I used a combination of the Blender and Skymodel hillshading methods.


Recreation sites, selected trails and private land
Recreation sites are from current provincial data. Private land is tinted yellow, and comes from ParcelMapBC.
Trails, however, are trickier to come by. There is no provincial database of trails, so what is shown on these topos is the collection I have made of trails over the past twenty years. As well, they show the trails from the old NRCan topographic maps (as "historic trail"), plus a few routes of travel where there is no trail, but navigation is either straightforward or follows flagging.
As a caveat, there are certainly trails that are not on these maps, and some trails shown on these maps may no longer exist!


Park boundaries


Forestry roads
Where a Forest Service Road has a name, I've endeavoured to show that. I have not labelled all of the tiny branches that lead off them.




Cutblocks
Cutblocks replanted less than twenty years ago (i.e., since 2001) are shown as non-forested.




Because each individual map is small, there are 165 different sheets in the series, as shown on the mapsheet index below. Click on the image to download a full-size PDF (13MB).



You can also click on the legend below to download a page-size version.