Topo USA 5.0 West Region

Rating:
Summary: A lot for the $$, but not for serious backcountry navigation
Review: I got this software on sale for $35, but even for full price it offers a lot. However, while it is useful for getting a good overview of an area, for planning a backcountry trip, or perhaps even for on-trail hiking, I would not rely on this software for serious off-trail navigation. It simply does not have the detail or accuracy of USGS 7.5' quads. While reasonably good at representing mountain terrain (though not without problems), for some reason the software has real trouble with the canyon country of the Colorado Plateau. Streams are regularly shown flowing 50' or more up canyon walls before returning to what should be the watercourse, and the bottoms of canyons are frequently shown filled with a series of strange depressions or sinks down into and back up out of which streams supposedly flow. Dirt roads are occasionally shown scaling cliffs or dropping off of them into canyons. Even in mountain terrain, streams are sometimes shown flowing uphill, while lakes all too often seem to climb part way up the slopes of the basins that contain them.

In addition, several landscape features I am quite familiar with are misnamed and/or incorrectly located (e.g. Surprise Valley in Canyonlands National Park is called "Sunrise Valley," Hovenweep National Monument mysteriously shows up inside Mesa Verde National Park when it is in fact some 80 miles to the west, two of the three natural bridges in Natural Bridges National Monument are shown in the wrong canyon and/or many hundreds of yards from their actual locations). Routes I have hiked in the past, which I found with the help of USGS 7.5' quads, are impossible to discern from the lower level of detail offered by this software.

At $35 or even $50 for pretty decent topo coverage of the entire Western US, these are not huge drawbacks, but you should be clear about what you are and aren't getting for your money. It's a fun program to use for planning trips from home, but I very much doubt that I'll ever print maps with it for use in the field. For that, I'll still order my maps from Mytopo.com, which allows you to create your own custom topos (on waterproof paper) made from USGS 7.5' quads. If I had limitless funds, I might buy the National Geographic topo software, which uses real USGS 7.5' quads, but at $99 per state it would cost well over $1000 to get the same coverage as the Topo USA Western Region package. At any rate, for what I paid, I'm fairly pleased with this software, limitations and all.