Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board usgs map for whitney- i can find only in meters

seems so odd-is it available in feet too? thanks

That is strange. I looked at the USGS store and they are all in meters for that area.

I'd suggest checking the map series published by Tom Harrison Maps. I find those are good for overall planning purposes. For specific hikes, I use National Geographics Topo software with the California State series, coupled with MapSource and Garmin's Topo 2008. All three of the above use feet.

The newer 7.5 minute series maps are in meters. Everything before was in feet. At the bottom of the map you'll see they give you a conversion of 3.2802. You can also multiply by 3 and add 10% if you don't need it to be deadly accurate.


As I understand it all these maps are based on the older 15 minute maps. I use all three of these resources as well. Tom Harrison maps are on waterproof paper and have some nice mileage markers, trails drawn in, shaded relief, among some other cool features. The National Geographic Topo CD's are interesting because they have mated to the best of their ability all the topo maps of the Sierra and you'll find them going from feet to meters on some of them.

Given that I do a lot of trips out of the country I've had to do a lot of converting or just get used to meters because the rest of the world uses the metric system. My first altimeter was a Thommen 9000 meter model. I wrote the conversions to feet along the side of my maps. After a while of doing that it starts to come together.

It's a bit of a pain at first but I can attest that after a while it all comes together. With enough practice at it you can get a pretty good idea of what a certain elevation in meters converts to in feet and vice versa.

I'm a retired Track Coach. At one time I had a special calculator, whose brand name I have forgotten, that with a click
of a button could go back and forth between meters and yards. It was virtually 100% accurate and came in handy in 1977 in the Soviet Union at Sochi in the USA vs Soviet Union meet when they tried to fool us when they raised the bar on High Jump and Pole Vault. Of course this was way back in the late 70s and I understand the Russian track officials are much nicer now!

This calculator was very small and light weight and I would guess that something like this is available and very handy
for climbers using a metric map. Kurt's 3 x meters + 10% will probably be enough for most people and using a GPS and an accurate altitude meter would pretty much cover most needs.

We may need to explain to the younger people here what a calculator is. But there is undoubtedly an iPhone app.

Good one!

This post if very timely...I was just asking myself the same question in regards to why meters on some recent map purchases. Thanks for the explanation Kurt...

Yeppers, they are in meters. What I do is put x M = x' in the margins. My biggest problem is gauging rate of gain at a glance.

The Tom Harrison Cartography Maps work just fine for trail walking, like the MMWT. The USGS Maps are best for winter and off trail stuff where having a 1:24000 is a big help.

This is tangential, but a cool tool/technique for map geeks nonetheless:

-Did you know you can estimate slope angles from topo maps? Like, more than "that's steep and that's not", more empirical even. If you've got maps printed at 1:24000, there's a slope meter inside the cover of this otherwise very cool book from AIARE (American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education) You just match up the gap between the lines and read your slope angle. Careful reading and field checks show accuracy to 2-3 degrees. (disclosure: I teach AIARE courses, so kind of work for them)

-We scratched our heads for a while on how to deal with the 20m contour interval in parts of the Eastern Sierra (which, rumor has it, dates to the efforts on the 90's(?) to get the whole country metric)

-We found that, in older versions of National Geographic Topo, one can choose the scale at which one wants to print his or her maps. And in Europe apparently a common map scale is 1:25000 with 20m contours. We can print from Topo at 1:25000 and this tool from Brooks Range Mountaineering has a scale to estimate slope angles on the maps that result. I find it all pretty cool!