Free Map(s) 038: A Large Lake

It has been far too long since I've put up a new map. My original intention was to try and re-create the effects of Map034, but that took a LOT of work and frankly I didn't have it in me. I'm supposed to be working, I'm still not quite done with my Christmas "shopping", much less decorating, and truth be told I've been down a bit from some overly-stupid "drama" from some friends.

Still, those are my issues and you know what sometimes cheers my ass up? Trying to engage that creative side of my brain.

Below are two maps from an area I practically grew up in. I started with the appropriate USGS map and made some much-needed alterations, like removing a couple of silt dams. After cropping the much-larger map I started hand placing the trees, but I wanted this map started and finished today...so I took a different tact. Since the map actually covers a much larger distance than the river section in Map034, I don't think this was as big of a deal as I originally made it out to be.

In retrospect I might have wanted to "fix" what I have to assume was either a rode or more likely a power line access strip along the left side of the map. The line of missing vegetation wasn't as noticeable when I worked on the small sections of the map, but sticks out way too much for my tastes now.....

One thing I did do is "punch up" the terrain relief quite a bit. Since I've removed all of the contour elevation markings you could put this as high or low as you'd like. Maybe it is an alpine lake almost at the tree line....

Map038a

I thought the trees might be a little busy for those actually wanting to use the elevation contours, so the first version doesn't have them, opting to just show generic vegetation instead. You'll note that there are a bunch of small ponds on this map that don't show on the next one. I removed them from the other map because, for the most part, they are covered by the trees and would be hard to see....also they looked too much like artifact errors from the original map, so I removed them to make things cleaner. I opted to not emphasize them with the darker color on this map for the same reason.

Map038b

This map de-emphasizes the relief and contours and I almost removed them entirely, but I obviously didn't.

Hopefully you'll find one or both of these maps useful. I've left them both rather large 300 DPI JPGs so you could easily print them out, or reduce them in resolution for use with VTT.

I may decide to play with this map a bit more and tweak it in Adobe Illustrator to create a map that you could really zoom in on if you so desired. I haven't done that before and if I take that route I'll clean up the original some first and see what I can come up with.

In other words you may be seeing this map again.....

Since there are two maps you cannot click on the header graphic to download them. This is the link to Map038a and this is the link to Map038b. Please, if you find either one of these useful I'd like to hear from you. Suggestions or comments are always welcome.