The Gazetteer shows you which roads you’d need to drive to get there and information about road quality or gated access that you can’t find on most online maps. Meeting an Appalachian Trail thru-hiker in the 100 mile Wilderness at the southern end of Nahmakanta Lake, which has a nice beach.These are representative of the types of questions you can answer with any of the state-specific Gazetteers that Delorme publishes. Here are a few ways that you could use the Maine Gazetteer to plan trips that’d be hard to plan any other way. Level of detail on a Gazetteer page Gazetteers in Action: Some Examples It’s a treasure trove of outdoor recreation information that’s far easier to browse than anything online. All of the state’s lakes, ponds, streams, and rivers and the fish species found in each.All of the state’s public and private campgrounds and the services they offer from showers to RV amperage.Suggested family outings to conservation areas, museums, and historical locations that you can visit.All of the state’s public recreation areas and the activities each offer from swimming to riding.In addition to topographic maps, the Gazetteers contain huge lists of: They’re so useful for finding remote trailheads, trout streams, hiking trails, primitive campsites, and old jeep trails because they integrate so much information into a single uniform overview that I can’t get anywhere else. I use Gazetteers for planning on almost every trip I take into the backcountry. The scale in the Maine Gazetteer is 1:135,000, which is a good scale for identifying roads and natural features. Gazetteers are absolutely indispensable for planning backcountry trips and contain a lot of the information that is left out of activity-specific maps intended for hiking, backpacking, skiing, and mountain biking.Įach state is broken out into a numbered grid, each with a full-page topographic map. They’re published by a company called Delorme (recently acquired by Garmin) and contain detailed maps of each state including all of the paved and unpaved roads, seasonal roads, gated fire roads, mountains, ponds, rivers, streams, and campgrounds in the state, as well as a host of other recreation-specific information. I keep several map books in my car for the different states that I hike and backpack in, called Gazetteers.