Learn to Read Topo Maps: An Essential Skill for Landscape Photographers

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hi all? My name is Meredith here from the beautiful Rocky Mountains of Colorado. As a landscape photographer and outdoor educator, I can tell you from first-hand experience that learning how to understand and read topographic maps is an essential skill if you want to find the best photo locations, and take amazing landscape photographs. A topographic map is a type of map that shows you the shapes and features of the land, including things like mountains, canyons, and valleys. In this course, we'll be going over the basics of how to read a topographic map and how this information can help you as someone interested in taking better landscape photographs. I will be guiding you step-by-step through this course so it's very beginner friendly. You don't need to have any experience in reading maps and you don't even have to have any type of fancy camera equipment in order to take it. We're going to break everything down and cover all of the essential information that you need to understand about a topographic map. From what topo maps are and where to even find them, to how to read all of the colors, lines, shapes, and other symbols you will commonly encounter on a map. Once you have the ability to read and understand topographic maps, which are actually pretty simple, it will open up an entire new world of possibilities for you to explore. Whether you're a photographer who likes day hiking, backpacking, cycling, or even sight seeing trips from your car, when you know how to read maps, you'll be able to visualize locations and make more informed decisions about the best places to set up your shots. By the end of this course, you'll be able to read and interpret topographic maps like a pro and you'll be able to apply this knowledge to your landscape photography to create even better images on your adventures. Are you ready to explore this beautiful earth of ours and find the best photo locations? If so, then I can't wait to see you in the first lesson. 2. What is a topographic map?: [MUSIC] Welcome to the class y'all. I am so excited you're here. In this first lesson, we're going to talk about what exactly topographic maps are and where to go about finding them so that you can start to use them on your own adventures and photography trips. A topographic map or topo map, for short, is a type of map that shows you the three-dimensional surface of Earth in two-dimensions. In other words, it allows you to visualize the shape of the Earth's surface and features such as mountains and valleys and canyons on a two-dimensional flat surface. The United States Geological Survey, or USGS for short, started a project back in 1882 to map the entire surface of the United States. Throughout the 20th century, the USGS published over 55,000 topographic maps, and this ended in 1991 when the contiguous 48 states were completely mapped. Currently, there's a number of different map makers other than the USGS. Sometimes these maps can have even more accurate and up-to-date information than some of the more outdated USGS topo maps. Regardless of the topo map you're reading and the maker of that map, if you have a solid understanding of how to read a USGS topo map, then you'll be able to read and understand virtually every other topo map made by any manufacturer. For this reason we're going to focus on USGS topo maps throughout this course and how to specifically read and understand those maps. Throughout this course we're going to do a deep dive on all the essentials you need to know about a topo map and what a topo map is, we'll start to become more clear as we proceed through the lessons and start to get into the nitty-gritty details. How do we even go about finding these topographic maps? Where are they? These days, there are two main types of topo maps that you can find, and those are both printed and digital. Printed maps are the more traditional types of maps that are just printed on paper, and if you're a hiker, a backpacker, and you do any type of adventuring on trails, you're definitely always going to want to carry a printed topo map with you. One of the best places to find printed maps these days is at outdoor gear shops and retailers. Usually at a gear shop, you'll find a section that's completely devoted to maps, and one of the most popular map makers these days is National Geographic. You'll find maps that look just like this, and they come for virtually every part of the country that you can recreate. National parks, national forest, wilderness areas, places like that, and if you're a geek like me, you can start to collect. This is just a small sample of my Nat Geo Map Collection. They're waterproof and pretty rip proof, they're extremely durable, and it's important to mention that if you are, say out on a hiking trip, even if it's just a short day trip, it's important to have a paper printed map with you. Even though as we'll talk about, there's digital maps, paper maps can't fail you in the back country, say, unlike your phone, which could die if you had a map on your phone and it died, you could be in a lot of trouble. Printed maps are always great to have or you should have on you if you do any type of outdoor adventuring, always have those maps on you so that you can both navigate in addition to plan your photography trips. You can also purchase printed maps from the USGS map store and you can have those mail to you, and there's a number of other online map retailers. I will provide links to where you could buy these printed maps and have the mailed to you. I'll put those links in the course description, if you want to go to these places and purchase maps, you know where to do that. The second type of map that I mentioned are digital maps. There are a number of different websites that you can go to and get topographic maps that work on a computer applications. They work really directly from your web browser. These are great for brainstorming and exploring and getting ideas of trails and places to go shoot for photography trips. You can also download them to your phone and have them out with you in the field. I highly recommend using these types of digital maps, they're extremely easy to use, and some of these companies that make digital apps like Gaia, GPS and CalTopo, will allow you to layer all really useful information on top of your map so that you can put a really detailed trip plan together. You can also access digital topographic maps in an online USGS topo map database, which you will learn how to access and use in the following lesson and we'll be using throughout this course. But this is a great way to access the official USGS topo maps in a way that's really accessible and it's a great way to start learning how to use maps. In the next lesson, you are going to start learning the basics of how to read a topo map. I look forward to seeing you there. 3. What's on a topo map?: [MUSIC] In this lesson, you're going to learn about the basic features of a topographic map. The first type of map that we're going to look at is a USGS topographic map. You learned a little bit in the last lesson about how the USGS, or the US Geological Survey was the first to map the entire surface of the United States. This has resulted in tens of thousands of topo maps that continue to be updated, and you can actually access all of these maps in a USGS online database, which we'll look at in just a moment. The USGS topo map that you're looking at right here is a section within Rocky Mountain National Park, which is a beautiful national park in Colorado, near where I live in Denver. This is an incredibly beautiful and stunning place that's great to study topographic maps; so we'll be exploring this area throughout the course. I'm sure when you first look at this map, and if you've never seen a topo map before, it can seem a little bit overwhelming. There's a lot of information, colors, lines, and information around the map that at first can seem a little bit overwhelming. But we're going to learn step-by-step. Go through each of these symbols, colors, everything on and around the map, one-by-one so that you can slowly start to understand what all of these things mean. By the end of this course, you're going to have a really solid understanding of how to read these maps and what everything means. Before we jump into reading this map, I first want to show you how you can access the database of all of these USGS topo maps so that if you want to download your own map and follow along with me, you can do so. You can download these maps from literally any part of the United States. In order to access these maps, we'll start by going to the following website. I will provide a link in the course description of this exact URL. The URL is ngmdb, which stands for National Geologic Map Database.usgs, for US Geological Survey,.gov/topoview. Once you make your way to this website, feel free to pause this video and look through some of the information described below. This can be some useful information that you might find it interesting. But for the purposes of this course, we're going to go directly to get maps. So click on "Get Maps". You'll be taken to a map of the United States. Now, once you get here, you can start to Zoom in on any part of the United States that you want to download a topographic map from. I live in Colorado. We're going to be exploring Rocky Mountain National Park, so I'm going to start Zooming in on Colorado. Rocky Mountain National Park is located just around this area where this massive peak is, so I'm going to Zoom in further right here. You can see as we Zoom in, we're starting to see topographic information. Now wherever you want to download your map from, you simply click on the map and to the right here, you will see a whole list of maps of that area populate. These are maps dating all the way back to the first time that this area was mapped. Here is a historic map here from 1915. This is actually the date that the national park was established. This is over 100 year old map. These historical maps can be really cool and interesting to look at, but we're not going to want to use these outdated maps. We want to use the most recent map so that we have all of the most updated information, all of the most accurate information on our map. I'll scroll down here to the bottom and you'll see that they become more and more recent as you go down. Right here, this McHenrys Peak, Colorado map, that is the map that we're going to explore. I'll click on this. If you want to download this map, you have several options. In order to get the map that we're going to be looking at in this lesson, download either the JPEG or the GeoPDF version. We'll talk about KML a little bit later in the course but for now to just look at the map, download either one of these. You don't necessarily have to download this exact map that we're going to be looking at. All USGS topo maps have all the same basic characteristics in common, which we're going to look at right now. Once you download your map, and feel free to come back to this later and just follow along until you're ready to go back and download your own map, so we're going to head over to our McHenry Peak map. We're back at our USGS topo map. The first thing we're going to look at is the top right-hand corner. Up in the right-hand corner here is where you'll almost always find the name of the map. This map is named McHenrys Peak Quadrangle. A quadrangle is just a description of the shape of the map. We're looking at a square, and quadrangle just means that the map is a square. Sometimes you'll hear topo maps be called a quad. What that refers to is just a quadrangles; so it's a square shape mapping the earth. If we come back to our title here, you'll see that it says 7.5 minutes series. What this refers to is the amount of Earth that is represented on this map. Sometimes you'll see maps that are 15-minute maps and these maps cover a larger area and that can be useful if you're traveling a long distance and you don't want to carry multiple maps. But these 15 minute maps show less detail than 7.5 minute maps. Seven-and-a-half minute maps are great for showing just enough detail about the landscape without being a little too vague. Now let's come down to the bottom of the map here. Here at the bottom you'll see a key. This key here shows the man-made features on the map. It's not showing all of the symbols on the map, what all the colors and lines mean, but it is showing what the major man-made features, particularly what roads will look like. If we move over here to the left, you'll see an outline of the State of Colorado and the location of where this quadrangle is within Colorado. This red square right underneath my cursor here, is where this entire 7.5 minute quadrangle is located within Colorado. So we can see that this quadrangle is located in North Central Colorado. This little key down here is showing where this quadrangle is in relation to other quadrangles. This is really useful for when you don't see everything that you need to see on this particular quadrangles. Let's say hypothetically, we had a hike that started somewhere over here and then came all the way south out of this map. We would want to know which map to pull that went directly south of this map so that we could continue to map out what our trail is. In this case, we would look at our key and see that number 7, which is Isolation Peak, is the map that we would need to pull in order to have the full map of our route. We can do that by going back to the USGS map database, and searching for Isolation Peak. Coming down here and we can see that that map that we would need to pull directly south of our McHenrys Peak map would be located right here. Next let's look over to the left here at the scale. Now, this is really important. The scale is going to show you the relationship between the distance on the map and how that correlates to the distance in reality. What this means is one inch on the map, so if you were to measure one inch out on the map here, one inch on the map is equivalent to 24,000 inches in real life. In other words, 24,000 inches in the actual landscape. This is a measurement that we can use to measure and approximate distances on the map. We can also use these scale bars below the scale. These scale bars come in meters, miles, and feet, and you can use these scale bars to approximate distances on the map. If we come down here to the contour interval, contour intervals are related to contour lines and we're going to do a deep dive on what contour lines are and what contour intervals are in a future lesson within this course. But for now, just remember that when we get to that part of the course, when you need to know what the contour interval, you can look down here on the map and see what that is. Most maps, it's 40 feet, but it can be different. It can be 50, 80, 100 feet. But again, you'll learn what that means later in this course. If we move over to the left here, we'll see another really important feature of a topographic map. You'll see here that if you look closely, there are three arrows pointing north. You have magnetic north. This one represents true north, and this one represents grid north. The most important thing that you need to understand here is the difference between magnetic north, which points to the east, and true north, which points directly up towards the top of the map. Every topographic map is oriented to true north. This map that we're looking at here points directly to the North Pole and that's what true north is. It's the direction to the Earth's North Pole. Now you might be surprised to learn that true north is actually different than magnetic north. Magnetic north is the direction that your compass arrow will point.. When you're out in the field navigating with a topographic map and compass, it's extremely important to understand that the direction that your compass is pointing is going to be slightly different than what true north is, which is where your topographic map is oriented. You can see it right here, this is what's called the declination, and this is the difference between magnetic north and true north. This is important information to know when you're orienting your map in the field so that you can navigate properly in the field. Orienting the map is something that's beyond the scope of this course and you can learn about in a proper navigation course. But for now, just know that magnetic north is a little over eight degrees from true north. The other thing to be aware of is that magnetic north actually changes over the course of a year and it can actually shift up to 25 feet over the course of a year. This is the reason why you want to use the most updated map so that when you're orienting your compass in the field, you have a very accurate declination. If you're using a much older map that could have a different declination, then this could cause problems when you're orienting your map in the field and could even lead you off course. This could lead you to get off course and even get lost. There's many reasons to use the most updated map but having an accurate declination is definitely one of those reasons. Let's move on to the left here. We are at the left hand bottom corner of our map now, and with all this small text has to do with here is the map's datum. If you're not using a GPS device, you don't have to worry about any of this. But if you are using a GPS, you want to make sure that your GPS is set to the datum that you see on your map. This will ensure that your GPS is operating accurately, especially when it comes to locating your exact position on the map. Let's zoom out of our map here. You'll see along the margins of the map a series of numbers. We're going to go through what these numbers mean and the most important ones to look for. What these numbers represent are coordinate systems on the map. There are two main types of coordinate systems. One you may be familiar with, the latitude and longitude system, and the second one is the Universal Transverse Mercator, or UTM for short. We zoom in to one of these corners. These numbers right here represent the points of latitude and longitude. The numbers to the right and below are coordinates from the UTM coordinate system. What both of these coordinate systems basically do is they divide the Earth up into evenly spaced lines that run vertically from the North Pole to the South Pole, so up and down, and then horizontally, also from the North Pole to the South Pole. These coordinate systems allow you to pinpoint your precise location on the map. This can be extremely important if you are trying to locate where you are on the map if, say, you're lost, but also you get into a bind and you need to let rescuers know your exact location on the map, that's when your coordinate, either latitude, longitude, or UTM coordinates will be critical. That covers most of the important features that pretty much all USGS topo maps have in common. In the next lesson, we're going to talk about what all of this means on the map. What all of these colors, lines, these are the symbols on the map. We're going to talk about what all of that means and later through the course, dive deeper into how you can use this information to find really great photography spots. I will see you in the next lesson. 4. How to read topo map symbols: In this lesson, you're going to learn about the different types of symbols you can find on a topographic map. What I mean by symbols is the different colors, lines, and shapes that you'll see all over a topo map. Now, there's a large variety of different symbols that you can see on a topo map more than can be covered in this introductory course, but we're going to cover the most important ones that you need to know and ones that are pretty common to pretty much every topo map. First, we'll start with everything on the map that's blue. As you might have guessed, everything in blue represents water. This can be things like lakes, rivers, streams, creeks, and even glaciers and snowfields. If we start to zoom into the map here, we can see a little bit better a lot of the blue lines and shapes on the map. First you'll notice blue ovals or circle like shapes. These are all going to be bodies of water, so lakes, reservoirs, ponds, things like that. These blue lines that you'll see on the map are all rivers, creeks, and streams. You'll notice that a lot of these blue lines are solid, but some of them are dotted, like right here and right here. The difference is that the solid blue lines represent rivers and streams that flow year-round, so perennial rivers and streams. When you see rivers and streams that have dotted or dash lines, that means that this is a intermittent stream. This is a stream that doesn't necessarily run year-round. It could flow, say, early spring and then dry up later in the summer. If you're out on a trip and you need a reliable source of water, these blue lines with dots or dashes, don't trust that they're going to be necessarily available. They might have dried up. You can usually trust these solid blue lines, especially the thicker blue lines with more established rivers. Those, unless something extreme happens, are going to be flowing and be reliable sources of water. If we zoom out a bit and take a look over here, we can see these blue dots. What these represent are glaciers or snowfields. On some topographic maps, glaciers and snowfields can be represented by blue contour lines, which we'll discuss a little bit later, but just know that these don't represent water. It's going to be either snow or ice. If we look over to the right here, we can see a large area in green. If we zoom out, we can see that most of the terrain over in this direction is covered in light green. Green represents vegetation and it's not necessarily dense or extremely tall vegetation like dense tall forest. It can also indicate sparser vegetation and scrub lands. Back in the 1800s when the United States was first creating topo maps, the project was first commissioned by the US Army. The green represents areas where you could successfully camouflage a platoon of about 40 men. The way to think about this green area is vegetation that's dense enough that about 40 people could somewhat hide in it without being recognized from the sky, or at least not very easily. When you move over here to the west, you can see that this entire area lacks color completely. What this means is that there's very little vegetation. Doesn't mean that there's necessarily no vegetation, but it's extremely sparse and it's going to be at least low enough to the ground where you wouldn't be able to hide 40 people in it. You typically see white areas like this in high altitude areas where you're above timberline and there's very little large vegetation that can live at high elevations. You'll also see in desert areas where it's too arid and dry for forests and taller trees to get established. If you look over here in this area, you'll see a splotchy green area on white. What this is is just a transition zone between the green vegetated areas over here and the higher altitude less vegetated areas. The next important thing we see on the map are established trails. We see those in these dashed brownish orange lines that run through the map. Again, another reason to get the most updated version of a topo map is to make sure that the trail information is accurate. Because these are man-made features that can change at least a lot more quickly than say, rivers or mountains or lakes, you want to make sure that your topo map has the most accurate trail information. Finally, probably the most important feature of a topographic map are these crazy lines running all over, which I'm sure if you are new to topo maps are wondering what the heck these things are. These are called contour lines. All of these lines in brown that are running all over the map. In the next lesson, we're going to dive deep into what contour lines are. But in short, they show you the shape of the landscape. You're going to learn how to read what these contour lines mean. But for now, just understand that all of these lines are called contour lines and they're really the distinguishing characteristic of what makes a topographic map a topographic map. You typically won't see contour lines on trail maps or road maps. They're specifically designed to help you read the terrain of the Earth's surface. In the next lesson, we'll jump into what contour lines are and how you go about reading them. There are many more symbols that you can find on a topographic map. If you're interested to see what more of those symbols look like and how to interpret them, I'll leave a link in the course description to a USGS document that shows virtually all, if not most, of the symbols that you could potentially encounter on a topo map. Most of them are actually pretty self-explanatory. If you run into one of these symbols, usually you'll be able to tell what it means, but this is a great document to have as a reference. But the ones we've just discussed are really the most important ones and the only ones that we're going to be talking about for the rest of this course. I will see you in the next lesson. 5. How to read contour lines: [MUSIC] Welcome back y'all. In this lesson, we're going to jump right back into what we were discussing at the end of the last lesson, which is contour lines. As you learned, all of these brown crazy lines all over the map are called contour lines. Contour lines are really just imaginary lines that connect points of equal elevation, which means that if you were to physically on earth follow a contour line, the elevation would remain constant. In other words, if we look say, at this contour line here, which has an elevation of 12,000 feet, if we were to follow this line, wherever we follow this line, we will always stay at 12,000 feet. You can see that this line really follows a long path through this mountainous range. But if you were to stay along this line, if you were hiking out in these mountains, you would always be at 12,000 feet. You'll see if we zoom in here, that the elevation is written right on this contour line. So you'll see these numbers along certain contour lines, these bolder, thicker lines and these bolder lines are called index contour lines. These are the lines that are going to have the actual elevation written on them. In between these index contour lines, you'll see lighter contour lines, these are just regular contour lines, and there'll be four of these in-between index contour lines. When you're looking at a topographic map, every fifth contour line is going to be an index contour line. Index contour lines are really there to help you quickly see what the elevation is of the landscape so you can quickly scan this map and see where you are in terms of elevation. Right here in the original example showing you a contour line, we can see that the elevation or how high you are above sea level is 12,000 feet. Now you'll notice that the elevation change between each of the index contour lines is going up and down. From the 12,000-foot contour line, if we move to the west here, we go down to 11,800 feet. We drop down 200 feet in elevation. We can see the index contour line on the other side of our 12,000 feet contour line goes up in elevation by 200 feet. Hopefully, you're starting to see a pattern here where the elevation change so the vertical change in feet from one contour line to the next is 200 feet. If we start at 12,200, we go down in elevation by 200 feet to our 12,000-foot contour line and then we go down another 200 vertical feet to the adjacent contour line. You'll see this pattern continue. The next index contour line is at 11,600 feet. We can double-check that by following the line all the way to where the elevation is written on it. Now, if we zoom in a little bit here and look at these lighter contour lines, these lines are separated by a distance called the contour interval. The contour interval is simply the vertical distance from one contour line to the next. This distance is always going to be the same on a single map. The contour interval can be different on different maps but you can check what the contour interval is on your map by zooming out and looking down at the bottom of the map. Like we discussed in the previous lesson, if you look down here, you can see a contour interval of 40 feet. Again, what that means is that is the vertical distance from one contour line to the next. Let's look at an example of what that means. If we zoom in right here and look at this set of contour lines, we know from the map key down below that the difference between this line right here and this line right here is 40 vertical feet. Now this to be clear, this is the change in elevation, so vertical change in elevation. It doesn't have to do with the actual distance you were to travel if you were to hike from here to here. Now, this contour interval goes for every space between contour lines. From here to here is a 40-foot vertical change. It doesn't matter how closely spaced the lines are together, it's always going to be a 40-foot drop or a 40-foot gain depending on which direction you're going. If this line is 12,200, if we jump to that line, this contour line will be 12,240. You can see down here these two lines are spaced further apart. That doesn't matter. The vertical change is going to still be 40 feet, but it's going to occur over a longer distance. The hiking distance from here to here, if we were to look at the scale down below, will be further than the hiking distance from this contour line to that contour line. But again, it's always going to be 40 feet in vertical elevation change. Let's say you didn't have a key at the bottom of the map to tell you what exactly the contour interval is. While for most maps it is 40 feet, it can be every 50 or 100 feet depending on the map that you're using. What you can do to calculate that out is determine the difference in elevation from one index contour line to the next so from 12,200 feet to 12,400 feet, that's a total vertical difference of 200 feet. Since these index contour lines are every fifth contour line, we can count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. We can divide that 200-foot vertical difference by five to get 40. Contour lines are not only essential for telling you what the elevation is of a location on the map, but they're also important to show you how steep the terrain is. A very important thing to understand about contour lines is that the closer together that they are, so lines like over here, which are very close together and down here, which are also very close together, the closer they are together, the steeper the terrain is. On the flip side, the further they are apart, the less steep the terrain is, if we look right here, these are much more widely spaced contour lines, which means that this area is going to be much flatter than this area right here. This is going to be a very steep slope. Again, the reason for that is because you're jumping up from one contour line to the next here in a very short distance. We jump here from 11,000 feet to 11,040 feet in a much shorter distance than hiking 40 vertical feet from here to here or even from here to here. Again, the closer the contour lines are to each other, the steeper the terrain is going to be and the more widely spaced they are, the more flat the terrain is going to be. If we look up here, we see very closely spaced contour lines. The closer they get together, the more vertical the slope is going to be. Right here, these lines are so close together that this would probably be impossible to hike up. This would likely be something that you would need climbing gear to get from say, here all the way to here. Again, we know we're going uphill from here to here because we can see over here, this index contour indicates that we are at 11,200 feet. As we move in this direction, we keep crossing contour lines, they get higher and higher in elevation until we get to about 13,000 feet. The third most important thing to understand about contour lines is that the shapes of contour lines can indicate specific features on the landscape. What I mean by features, I mean things like mountain peaks, valleys, ridge lines. Contour lines are not just going to show you how steep the terrain is, but they'll allow you to pick out and identify these features on the map. For example, we have a peak right here. Throughout the course, we're going to do a deep dive on how to identify features on the map using the shapes of contour lines. Shapes of contour lines occur in repeatable patterns that can help you pick out these features. Once you understand what they look like and you've seen examples of them, you can start to say, hey, I recognize immediately that this is a mountain peak, even if you didn't have the name of the peak labeled right there. The skill of learning how to read these features on a topographic map is probably going to be the most important skill in serving you when you're trying to find interesting places for photography shoots. If you're trying to find places that might be particularly photogenic like ridge lines and mountain peaks and compositions with lakes and things like that. We'll talk about that towards the end of the course as well. Now, the if whole idea of contour lines seems a little bit unclear to you. If it still seems a little fuzzy in your mind, don't worry, because sometimes this concept takes a little bit of time to sink in and I promise you at some point, the more you look at these maps, it's going to start to click. In the next lesson, I have a great exercise design to help you visualize contour lines in three-dimensional space using Google Earth. I think that this is really going to help you out to start visualizing what these lines mean and to get a better grasp of what's going on, on the landscape and how it correlates to the lines that you're seeing here on this map. The next lesson is going to be really fun so I will see you there. 6. How to use Google Earth to read contour lines: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to use a really powerful free software called Google Earth, which is a great way to visualize the landscape without actually having to be there. We're going to be able to visualize what a topographic map looks like in three-dimensional space. I recommend when going through this lesson to just follow along with me all the way through the end of the lesson first and then coming back and re-watching this lesson and go through the steps of downloading this software and trying all of this out on your own. The first thing you'll want to do is download Google Earth, which is a free software and you can get it as a web application. But for the purposes of this course, go ahead and download Google Earth Pro onto your desktop. If you click here, it'll take you down the page and you can just click here to download Google Earth. I already have this downloaded to my computer, so I will close this. You can either pause here and download it or just move along with me through this lesson and come back and do it later. Now, once you have Google Earth downloaded, we're going to go back to our USGS topo map online database. In the map you're looking at here is where we've been through the previous parts of the course. We're back in Rocky Mountain National Park and we're going to continue to explore the topographic map that we've looked at in the first few lessons. We're going to look at the McHenry's peak quadrangle. We come over here to the panel, we have our McHenry's peak and the map you download doesn't have to be the map that I'm showing you here. If you want to explore another part of the United States, say Oregon, Alaska, Texas, whatever that is, you can follow along, but just choose a different map. But here we're just going to stick with the McHenry's quadrangle. Once you find the map that you want, I'm always going to pick the most recent map, when you click on the map, you'll see a few options here. If we wanted to print out the map, we would click on GeoPDF or JPEG or even Tiff if we wanted to actually have a physical map. But in order to open up this map in Google Earth, we're going to click on the KMZ option. This is going to be a Google Earth compatible file. Click on that. Once you have it downloaded, go ahead and open it up. When you click on that KMZ file, it should open up in Google Earth and drop you right on the landscape where this quadrangle lies within Rocky Mountain National Park. This is the really cool part. If you're brand new to Google Earth, I do have a scouting course you can check out where I cover how to use Google Earth in more detail than we're going to be going into here. Here we're just going to be using Google Earth for the purposes of understanding what's going on in a topographic map. There are some basic things you should know in order to navigate through space on Google Earth. First, you want to make sure that this checkbox right here is checked. This is what's going to make your map three-dimensional. Make sure that terrain is checked. Now, when you're on the map, in order to zoom in and out, you will scroll with your mouse, in to zoom in and scroll out to zoom out. There are also a variety of keyboard shortcuts that you can use in order to navigate through space using Google Earth and I will provide a link in the course description where you can find all those keyboard shortcuts, but they're pretty straightforward. You can use the arrow buttons to move forward and back or side to side and you can hold down Command on a Mac or Control on a PC in order to change your direction. If you hold down Command and use the arrow keys, you can use the up arrow to look up. You can use the down arrow to look down and then the left and right arrow keys will move you from side to side. You can also, just to show you an example, I'm going to zoom in using the mouse holding Command on a Mac or holding Control on a PC, you can click and drag your mouse while holding Command or Control and this will give you the ability to rotate in all directions. This is probably the easiest way to rotate your position. You can also use these toggles around here to move forward and back and you can zoom in and out using these toggles as well. The keyboard shortcuts are a lot easier and the other important thing to know is if you change your position, your direction, say right here we're facing west, you want to reorient yourself to north, simply click N and you'll reposition yourself directly to North. We're going to stay in this position for most of the time because this will orient us in the exact position that our topographic map is positioned. If you remember, in the first few lessons we talked about how topo maps are oriented at True North, so directly towards the North Pole. Clicking this button will align your topo map with where you're standing on the landscape in Google Earth. This is the map that we've been looking at throughout the course, but now it's simply draped over all of the mountains and topographic features of the landscape. The best way to visualize this is to come over here to this little gradient button and this tool will allow you to change the opacity of this topographic map, so this is layered on top of the landscape. You can pull the opacity down here and if this isn't working for you, make sure that temporary places is highlighted, so just click on there and then come back down to your slider and as you pull it back, you can see the landscape beneath the topographic map. If you pull it all the way down, you can see three-dimensional terrain. Let's start to explore how some of these contour lines correlate to what we're seeing here. Let's zoom out a bit and let's check out this mountain peak right over here, this Otis peak. Let's pull the slider back up so we can start to see our topo map. You can see sometimes when it's layered onto Google Earth, it doesn't do the best job, especially when it's on a very steep cliff. If we pull that back, we can see this is a very jagged, steep cliff. This probably wasn't the best example to show you that. Let's try another mountain peak. Let's pull out our slider back up here, that looks a little bit better. Here's a perfect example of what the contour lines look like going up a slope. If we pull this back down, we can see this is a big slope up to the top of a mountain pass. At the top here is Sproat Mountain. Let's pull our contour lines back up. We can see on the map the lakes in blue up and around here correlate exactly to where those lakes are in reality. As we work our way up to the top of Sproat Mountain, we start here and see all the way down at 10,200 feet. If hypothetically, we were to hike from this point all the way up here, you can see from these index contour lines that we're jumping up in elevation up and up and up all the way to this mountain peak till we get to 12,600 feet and even a little bit higher because there's a contour line just above that. Since our contour interval is 40 vertical feet, we would end up at this line right here, we'd be 12,640 feet in elevation. As we start to explore around here, you can see how these contour lines wrap around the landscape, almost slicing up the landscape in cross-sections like a layer cake. You can see a lot of these lines that are really close together, like we talked about, the ones that are very close together means that the terrain is very steep. If we pull this down, we can indeed see that this is a very steep slope. This is not something that you would want to hike up. We pull this back up, we can see this jagged area around here, we can see how the contour lines outline the shape of this jagged area, so contour lines can give you a good idea of how smooth or how rough the landscape is going to be. Obviously, you'd want to hike over a more mellow smoother terrain, even if it is steep compared to something like this that's super jagged and probably very rocky and unstable. We pull these contour lines back out again, we can see right here, see how these are so widely spaced apart, so this line to this line is much more widely spaced than this line to this line. That indicates that this is going to be much flatter, much smoother. If you were to be just dropped off right here, you could probably walk around with relative ease. Pulling this down a bit, it does look like on Google Earth, like this is a pretty mellow flat area that you could walk around, at least definitely compared to right here. Let's pull our lines back up again. We can start to scan the landscape and see how the contour lines are correlating to what we see on the actual landscape. Now what I want you to do is to try this out for yourself. If you watch this lesson all the way through and haven't tried it yet, I encourage you to download Google Earth Pro. It's a free software. Go into the USGS topo map database, download one of those topo maps as a KMZ file and just open it up on your Google Earth and just start to explore it in three-dimensional space and look at what all of these contour lines are doing. Pay attention to where the contour lines are spaced out, so right here, this is relatively flat terrain. But to get up to this point and we see it's much higher because of the index contour line indicates that this is a higher elevation than down here. This is a hike up. Pay attention to the difference of these flatter spaces and then these steeper spots. I also want you to pay attention to the trail. If we look at a lot of these trails, we can see that they follow around the topography of the landscape in more of the mellower spots. These trails, instead of going straight up these steep contour lines, they wind their way around the most, or at least the most relatively gentle sloping parts of the landscape. I encourage you to also pull this all the way up and try to guess what's going on. Guess if you're in a valley, if you're on a peak, play around moving yourself, orienting yourself in space and testing yourself, asking what's going on the landscape, say right here and then pulling this back down and seeing if what you guessed was actually accurate. This is something I encourage you to use throughout the rest of the course as we start to identify what specific contour line shapes correlate to in terms of the features on the landscape. For example, how do we use contour lines to identify mountains, ridges, valleys and things like that. In the next lesson, we're going to start to learn how to pick out valleys, canyons, and other types of water drainage systems. I will see you in the next lesson. 7. How to identify drainages, valleys, and canyons: [MUSIC] Welcome back y'all. In the next few lessons, we're going to be reviewing different types of topographic features. A topographic feature is just something that you can look at on the map, like a mountain or a ridge line or a river, a hill, a lake. You can easily pick these features out on a topo map once you know what they look like. Because each type of feature displays a similar pattern of contour lines. If you can understand what these contour line patterns look like on the map, this will help you to plan photography trips and find interesting places to shoot, which we'll talk about a little bit later in this course. Being able to pick up these contour line patterns will also help you to navigate when you go out on your trips, and you'll be able to correlate what you see on the map to what you are seeing in real life out on the trail. The first types of features that we're going to be looking at and studying in this lesson are water drainages. These are depressions in the earth's surface like valleys and canyons, that are formed by things like rivers, streams, and glaciers. These are areas of land or water from rain or snow melt dreams downhill into a body of water like a river, a lake, or even the ocean. Now, the map that we're looking at right now is the same map that we've been studying for the first part of this course. We are back in Google Earth, and we're looking at the McHenry's Peak quadrangle, just like we have been in previous lessons, which is in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado. Let's zoom in here. I'm going to orient this map so that we are looking directly down onto the map. We are in an area that is really filled with all kinds of glaciated valleys such as these in here, and lots of little lakes as you can see through here, that are technically called tarns. These form as a result of glacier activity. While we do still have quite a few glaciers up in here and snowfields that you can see, a lot of the glaciers that once existed in this area have melted between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. All of these drainage areas that we're going to be looking at are areas of land or water from rain or snow melt drains downhill into a body of water such as a river, a lake, or even the ocean. This might seem obvious, but it's important to remember when you're looking at these topo maps that gravity is going to force water to take the shortest path out to the ocean or out to sea level. When we're looking at these topo maps, you can get an understanding of which direction all of these rivers and streams are flowing by looking at the change in elevation. This Chaos creek, for example, is flowing from a higher elevation. If we start over here, this is 11,200 feet, if we follow this index contour and it flows downhill. As we can see, these contour lines get smaller and smaller in elevation. We know that Chaos creek is going to be flowing from here out towards here, and draining into this small tarn or lake right here. These drainages that we're going to be looking at, so valleys, canyons, their shape develops in response to the local topography and the subsurface geology. Drainage channels develop where there's a lot of surface runoff and the rocks are more easily eroded by forces such as wind, water, and ice. In other words, these areas which we'll be exploring in a moment, where we see the creeks running down, the reason they formed in these particular places on the surface of the earth has a lot to do with the underlying geology. Things like faults and differential erosion and all nerdy geology things that's beyond the scope of this course. Another thing to keep in mind is that all of the rivers and creeks and streams that you see on the map eventually drain into larger rivers that ultimately drain all the way out to the ocean. Here in Colorado we are very far from the ocean, and we're very close to what's called the continental divide. Really what that means is that when we are on the west side of the continental divide, all of the rain, snow, and water from rivers and streams will flow eventually into the Colorado River and then out to the Pacific Ocean. When we are on the east side of the continental divide, all of the snow, ice, rain, and water from rivers and streams will eventually drain eastward into the Gulf of Mexico in the Atlantic Ocean. Now, let's take a look at how to use contour lines to identify what a drainage looks like. Let's zoom in a little bit more onto Chaos creek. Now, if we follow along Chaos creek, we can see that all of the contour lines follow the similar pattern where they form the shape of the letter U or the letter V. So following along this creek, there's a V, a U. They get a little bit wider, but they all follow this general pattern of being in the shape of the letter V or U. The same goes if we follow it in the other direction towards this little lake, they form U shapes and V shapes. If we look up here to Tyndall creek, the same thing holds. As we work our way up the creek, all of these contour lines follow this U or V like shape. Here's a really important thing to note. As we follow these V-shaped contour lines, we see that the elevation is increasing in the direction that the apex of these are used are pointed. In other words, all of these V's are pointed up hill, and we can tell that they're pointing up hill because each contour line is increasing in elevation. We see that from the elevations written on the index contour lines. We call these types of lines concave contour lines. They point in the uphill direction, and they double back on themselves in the downhill direction. Concave contour lines are the distinguishing types of contour lines that let you know that you're looking at some type of drainage, so some type of river valley, glacial valley, a canyon, any type of concave depression in the earth's surface which collects water and moves it from a point of higher to lower elevation. If we zoom out of the map just a bit, we can start to find concave contour lines all over the map. Typically, where we see streams and rivers and things like that. The same pattern holds for Andrews creek right here. We have these convex contour lines that point in the uphill direction that follow all the way up the creek, all the way up towards this tarn, and then even continue all the way up here where they stop. Which means that all of this in here is going to be a depression because all of these concave contour lines fill this area. If we move down a little bit, we see the same pattern holds, and you'll notice that a lot of these lakes lie within these valleys because they are at relative low points of elevation. We see this as a large valley. Again, we know that because these are all concave contour lines, the apex of these lines point in the uphill direction. We look at these index contour lines, we're moving uphill and they double back on themselves, so the two tails of these lines point in the downhill direction. Now I'm going to pull down this slider on this map to lower the opacity so we can see what these really look like in real life. You can see that these are massive valleys on the Earth's surface. These were carved hundreds of thousands to millions of years ago during the Pleistocene by massive glaciers. Now they serve as reservoirs for small lakes and streams as water falls from the sky, hits these peaks, and then drains into these river basins. Let's pull up our contour lines just a bit so we can see both the contour lines and the landscape. Again, we see here Chaos Creek. We pull this up to see a little bit better. All of these concave contour lines that follow the creek are in a massive glacial valley. Hopefully, you can start to see a pattern here all over the map. We have concave contour lines that indicate depressions in the Earth's surface, Some can be very wide, like very large valleys and some can be pretty narrow. Here we have a pretty wide valley indicated by these wide, U-shaped concave contour lines. When you see them in more of a U-shape and fairly spaced apart, that means that it's going to be a pretty wide valley. If we look a little bit over here. We can see a series of concave contour lines that are more v-shaped and pointed and more narrow. The two tails of them are closer together. This means that this is a more narrow drainage where this Hidden River flows through. Again here we can see that the very points for apexes of these V or U-shaped lie directly on top of where the river follows. Even if hypothetically this hidden river wasn't drawn on the map, we could probably draw it on ourselves if we were to follow the point of these concave contour lines all the way up and we eventually make it all the way up to a peak right here. Let's pull down this slider just so we can see what that looks like in real life. For the rest of this lesson, we're going to hop over to Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, which is another stunning national park on the west side of Colorado. I wanted to show you these areas that you could see more examples of what drainages and concave contour lines look like. There's a massive river, the Gunnison River that's carved its way through this canyon. This river drains northwest all the way out towards the Colorado River near Grand Junction Colorado. The Gunnison River is one of the main tributaries of the Colorado River. Here we're looking at a much more substantial river than we were looking at in Rocky Mountain National Park. Let's zoom into the map here to take a look at what the topography looks like. We start to see quite a few concave contour lines. If we zoom in here to Deadhorse Gulch, we see that the river starts down below. Let's see at about 6,600 feet. If we follow this index contour all the way around, we're about 6,600 feet in elevation from sea level, so quite a bit lower than we were in Rocky Mountain National Park. As we go up here, we see these concave contour lines pointing uphill. This, as the name Deadhorse Gulch indicates, is a depression. It's a gulch or drainage where water collects will flow down and eventually into this river. The same thing right here we see another drainage or water would flow due to gravity in the path of least resistance all the way down into the river. You might notice this map is a little bit fuzzy because it's layered over Google Earth. If we zoom out, we can see a little bit more clearly. See how this has a dotted or dashed blue line. We talked about in this symbol section earlier in the course, that this means that this stream or creek is intermittent and it might only ever run if there's a lot of rainfall. It could be dry most of the year. This is a much drier, more desert-like part of the state. Just something to be aware of when you are looking at rivers and drainages and creeks, that these dashed lines mean that there may or may not be water in this drainage. Keep in mind as well that drainages form due to erosion, due to water. Say there's not actually any water in this drainage right here, the reason this formed this because there was at one point water flowing down this drainage eroding the landscape into what it looks like today. When you go out to areas like Utah and Arizona, you might find washes and canyons like Slot canyons that have no water in them at least most of the year but those canyons were formed by water and that could have been at some point in ancient history millions of years ago. This main river down here, the Gunnison River, that is going to be flowing year round and we know that because both it's a solid blue line and it's a thick solid blue line. Unless something really extreme or catastrophic happens, this river is always going to be flowing. We see a lot of other little intermittent streams and drainages. Following along this river you pay attention, the wall start to become steeper and steeper. Eventually, when we get to the surface here, we see the contour lines spaced out, especially up and around here. That means this is going to be a much flatter surface and this is going to be extremely steep. Let's take a look what that looks like on Google Earth. We do see here how we have all kinds of drainages. We look at the map here, we see these concave contour lines, they're pointing uphill and double-back, their tails point downward, and there's not even any water right here. But we can tell from these contour lines that this is some drainage or depression. When we look at the actual landscape, we can indeed see that that is what is the case. I hope that helps you get a good idea of what drainages look like on a topographic map. If you want to check out this particular topo map that we were looking at in Black Canyon of the Gunnison, you can go to the USGS topo map database that we looked at previously and just type in a search Grizzly Ridge, Colorado, the most recent 2022 topographic map and you can start to explore this area. In the next lesson, we're going to study a different type of topographic feature called a ridge line. Things like, as you see right here, that point out ridges and outcrops that are literally just the inversions of drainages. With that, I will see you in the next lesson. 8. How to identify ridgelines: [MUSIC] Welcome back. The next topographic feature that we're going to study and discuss are ridge lines. A ridge line is almost exactly the opposite of a water drainage. The contour lines are in almost the exact same shape in most cases, except they're inverted from what a drainage is. We'll look at that in just a moment. Now, we're back in Rocky Mountain National Park and we're looking at the same topographic map, the McHenry's Peak topo map that we've been looking at throughout the course. Let's zoom into our map here and start finding some of these ridge lines. Now, we're looking again at the same three glacial valleys that we've looked at in the previous lesson. The Tyndall, Chaos Creek, and Andrew's Creek valleys. It's very common to find a ridge directly adjacent to a drainage. If we're in the drainage here, the ridge is going to be adjacent. Right along here is what we would call a ridge line, and this is a relatively wide one. Some are so narrow that they'd be almost impossible to walk on. If we zoom down in here, you see that the contour lines follow really the exact same shape as we saw in the drainage here. The critical difference is that these contour lines, their apex or the top of them are pointed in the downhill direction, while their tails double back in the uphill direction. We can see that here from the index contour lines, we have 11,800 feet, and as we move in this direction, this one right here is 11,400. As we move down, we see that where these contour lines are pointed is in the downhill direction. This makes them contour lines that are often called convex contour lines. Again, convex contour lines that indicate a ridge line, they point in the downhill direction, so the apex will point like an arrow towards a lower point of elevation, and their are two tails will double back in the uphill direction. It's literally just like valleys, canyons, and drainages in reverse. Let's pull back our slider here just so we can see what the actual earth looks like. You can see up here is a long ridge line. This is quite wide, where you are at a much higher point in elevation than if you were to drop down into this valley where we see the concave contour lines. Convex contour lines appear and concave contour lines down here. Let's pull our lines back out once again and zoom out of the map here. As we study the landscape, again, like we saw with valleys and concave contour lines, we see these convex contour lines all over the place. We see them right over here. We look down, the same pattern holds. The point of these line is almost like an arrow is pointing in the downhill direction. You can see we're going down this slope. If we pull this down, we can see how this is like a giant wide, relatively flat ridge that comes out in this direction. Again, right here, these are more pointed and their tails are a little bit closer together. We can see that this is more of a narrow ridge and this is going to be a pretty steep ridge because we see these contour lines are very closely spaced together. I want you to take some time to go around your map on Google Earth, pull up the topo map if you can, like you've learned in previous lessons, and start to pick out some of these ridge lines. We see one down here as well. This one's relatively narrow and pointed. We can even see the same thing over here. This is one actually quite massive ridge line. It has a pretty narrow apex that runs all the way, I believe from Long's Peak, this is a massive 14,000 foot peak, all the way out towards here. If we zoom in, we see contour lines that point in the downhill direction and their tails point uphill. Again, try this out for yourself. Try to pick out both ridge lines and drainages and check yourself to see if what you interpreted on the topographic map actually plays out on the actual landscape. In the next lesson, we're going to learn the patterns of how to identify mountain peaks so when you see peaks like this on a topographic map, you can identify them relatively quickly and know exactly what feature you're looking at on the map based on the common contour line characteristics that all mountain peaks have. I hope that helps you out and I will see you in the next lesson. 9. How to identify peaks, mountains, and hills: [MUSIC] Welcome back y'all. In this lesson, we're going to look at the third most prominent feature on a topographic map and that is peaks. This can be a mountain or a hilltop. It's really just a relative high point on the map. All peaks have a very similar pattern of contour lines that makes them easily recognizable on a topographic map. So let's pull our contour lines back up where we left off in the last lesson in Rocky Mountain National Park. Let's zoom out on the map here. I'm just going to pick a peak on the map. We're first going to look at this snowdrift peak. This peak shows a very typical pattern of which you see in contour lines of a peak. Most topographic maps have the name of the peak, especially if it's a prominent peak labeled. You'll also see sometimes this symbol of the letter X at the very top of the peak. This can also help you identify peaks, but typically you can identify a peak from contour lines by looking for it concentric circles around a single point. You can see here that all of these contour lines wrap around each other concentrically until you get to this very top contour line, a single circle, which is a local high point of elevation or a peak. We can calculate how high this actually is by looking at the index contour lines. This one is 12,200. We know the difference between each index contour line is 200 vertical feet. This one up here in bold would be 12,200 feet. Like we learned in previous lessons, the contour interval is 40 feet so from this index line to this adjacent contour line is 40 vertical feet. We can determine that this peak is about 12,240 feet in elevation. A lot of times you will see the precise elevation of a mountain peak written next to the name as well and that can help you pick out these peaks. If we look to the left and to the right here, the same pattern exists. We see these concentric circles that terminate in a single circular contour line. This again indicates a local high point. Again, right here as well, this would also be a local high point. If we pull the opacity down, we can see how it correlates to the landscape. If we pull this down just a bit again and zoom in, we see this peak right here, which aligns almost exactly with where that topographic contour line is showing where the peak is. Again, if we move over to what look like another small peak or local high point, it does look like there is a higher point of elevation right here, at least relative to the surrounding area. Let's check out another peak on the map. Let's check out Sprague Mountain. Get a little better bird's eye view here. This is a little bit more difficult to see, but the same pattern holds. We have concentric lines that wrap around each other. Here we have the same pattern as well. Whenever you see what looks like two peaks or two sets of these concentric circles, it could be even more if this extended out. This hourglass shape of contour lines in between them, that just means it's a mountain pass in between these two peaks. A mountain pass is just a low point of elevation or ridge line that connects two peaks together. Let's pull the opacity down just to see what this mountain looks like and yeah, we can see a local high point here on Sprague Mountain and right here as well. Let's pull our topo map back up. We move over north up here to Stones Peak, again, you can see the same pattern occurring. Concentric circles that terminate in a single circular or oval-like contour line. We can see one right here as well. Let's zoom back out again and that's essentially the key to quickly picking out peaks like mountain tops and the tops of hills quickly and efficiently on a map. Hopefully, as you start to scan your topo maps, you can start to recognize these patterns and quickly see where the mountains are on your landscape if you're looking at a different landscape than I am right now. Again here, you can quickly see another mountain peak. The same pattern holds as we get these circles that wrap around a central point. Now I'd like you to start to practice this on your own. Whether you're using this topographic map or your own, just start to pick out where you find mountain peaks or relative high points on the map, such as this one. You can see on the Joe Mills Mountain, there's quite a few contour lines that wrap around this mountain. Colorado obviously is a great place to practice studying mountains on a topographic map because there are so many mountains in Colorado, so you might want to go download a topo map from an area in Colorado. Virtually the entire state is covered in mountains. Again, just start to pick these mountains out, and hopefully, with practice, you'll start to get better and better in not just picking out features on the landscape like mountains, but also ridge lines and drainages that help you put together a complete picture of what this landscape looks like. In the next lesson, we're going to start to put everything that we've learned together and use our knowledge of how to read topographic maps and how to pick out topographic features on a map to plan photography trips and get an idea of what places might be particularly photogenic or places that might be really great places to shoot photographs. You're going to get a deeper understanding of why this is such an essential skill, not just for hikers and backpackers and adventures, but for landscape photographers as well. I will see you there in the next lesson. 10. How to find great photo locations on a topo map: [MUSIC] Welcome back to the class you all. In this lesson, we're going to start putting together everything that you've learned so far in this course so we can start to look at our map and find some of the best places for landscape photography. We're back here again in Rocky Mountain National Park, looking at a famous McHenrys peak quadrangle that we've been looking at throughout the course. Let's zoom in on the map here. This terrain should look very familiar to you. Hopefully at this point, all these contour lines are starting to make a lot more sense. As you probably already know, some of the best places to take photographs of large sweeping panoramic views is from the top of mountains as well as from the top of ridge lines. In this next example, I want to show you how I would go about taking a photograph of a specific peak on the topographic map that we're looking at right now. Let's say that I'm interested in shooting Hallett Peak, which is located right here. If we look at this map, we can see that the elevation goes up to a little over 12,600 feet. Probably if we zoom in here, there's two more contour lines above this index contour, so 12,640 up to 12,680. We're almost at 13,000 feet up here, which is really quite high. We're taking photographs of really tall peaks. It helps to get up in higher terrain so that you can be at a similar level of the peak that you're shooting. If you're down in this valley here, you may not get the best, or at least the most exciting composition of this peak compared to if you are up on a ridge line up high, close to 13,000 feet from another location shooting at this peak. When I'm looking at this topographic map, I'm thinking, where can I get up high in order to shoot this peak in a way that I'll get not just the peak, but grand, panoramic sweeping views of the entire surrounding area? Of course, the best way to do that is to hike up to a ridge line. If we zoom out, we can see that there are a few ridge lines that might have potential. This ridge over here that we talked about before. Again, we know this is a ridge line because of these convex contour lines that are pointing downhill and their tails double-back in the uphill direction. This is a potential ridge line, and then we have on the other side of Hallett Peak, here's a ridge line right over here. There are a few more over here as well that jut out, smaller outcrops. But I'm also keeping in mind what is going to be the most accessible ridge line. A lot of these might be impossible or at least extremely dangerous if you were to hike off trail to access. This ridge line over here, I notice there's a trail that comes up all the way from downhill close to this Bierstadt Lake and I'm sure if I had the adjacent topo map, I could see potentially a parking lot or a trailhead. If we come up this trail, it'll take us all the way up to the top of this ridge line. This would probably be a pretty challenging hike. But if we made it all the way up this flat-top mountain trail, we would likely get some really great views of Hallett Peak. Let's look at the elevation here. If we look at this contour line right here, we see we're at 11,000 feet in elevation. As we move up this hill, we get to 11,200, 400, 600, 800, and then right here on this index contour, 12,000 feet in elevation, if we were to count. If you stood right here, if you are out on the landscape on this flat top mountain trail, at this exact point on the map, you would be at exactly 12,000 feet in elevation. Remember, we said we calculated out that this peak is almost 13,000 feet. On our trail, we'll be at 12,000 feet. That's pretty promising. We're going to be at a very similar elevation, about 1,000 feet lower in elevation than this Hallett Peak right here. This is how topographic maps can really help you plan out your photography trips. Because if you didn't know how to read a topo map, you wouldn't know that there's a ridge line up here that would put you at just a little elevation below Hallett Peak. What we can also see here is that there's a steep drop-off and whenever you see a ridge line with a steep drop-off, usually at the edge of that ridge line, there's going to be some great views. There's not going to be something obstructing your view. We can see from this topographic map that there is this valley in-between where we are on flat top mountain trail, this valley here, and how it peaks. We can see from the topo map that there's going to be nothing obstructing our view and this, again, is essential knowledge when planning a photography trip, because let's say there was some kind of feature on the landscape in here that was taller in elevation than this point right here, it would obstruct our view of Hallett Peak most likely. We know from the map that we're going to get a good vantage point of Hallett Peak if we are right here along flat top mountain trail. Let's check out using Google Earth what this would look like. Assuming we're going to stand somewhere around here for our photoshoot of Hallett Peak, what we can do is this cool trick on Google Earth. Come over to this top right-hand control bar, click and drag this little orange guy and place him directly where you want to stand on your map. This will put you on the ground level. We are on ground-level view and we see our topo map layered over the landscape. We know that Hallett Peak is to the southwest of us. Let's turn around in that direction. I am going to turn down the opacity here. You can walk around the landscape using your arrow keys. I'm moving in the direction of that ridge that we looked at. Right now we're at the edge of that ridge looking over the valley and this right here is going to be Hallett Peak. You can see that we do have a really great vantage point with which to shoot Hallett peak. Again, our topo map gave us all the information that we needed to know in order to find a great spot to shoot this peak. Here is the valley below. We are literally at the edge of that steep drop-off and you can see that there's nothing going to be obstructing our view. I'm going to go ahead and exit ground-level view here and zoom out. Let's orient ourselves back towards north. We were just standing right around here looking at this peak, right here. There is our flat-top mountain trail which we can see on Google Earth. Let's pull up our slider so we can see the map. You can see that the trail, which you can see from satellite imagery, matches perfectly with the topographic map trail. To summarize, what you're looking for when you're looking for good viewpoints is when you're scanning your topographic map, you're looking for high points, local high points like peaks, and also ridges, which are indicated again by these convex contour lines, contour lines that point downhill. In this next example of how to use a topo map to find a great photo location, let's try to find a great spot to shoot at one of these lakes. Rather than being way up on one of these ridge lines, let's try to find a photogenic lake. Oftentimes, these lakes or turns that are in glacial valleys are extremely photogenic from the end opposite of the valley. For example, we have this pretty long oval-shaped lake right here. The glacial valley extends down here. Again, we know that this is a valley because of the concave contour lines that are pointing up. These types of lakes are most photogenic from the opposite side of the valley so from this end. Or say you are in this valley, these lakes would be photogenic from this end, so the north end. Let's say we want to shoot one of these lakes in Glacier Gorge. As we're scouting here and planning out our photography trip, we're trying to determine which one of these lakes will be most photogenic. Will it be this lake or the Mills Lake back here? Looking at the topo map, we can see that if we were to stand at this end of the lake, looking in this direction, so standing here and looking south, we'd likely get a view of the lake in the foreground and then this expansive valley that runs down here in the mid-ground and background. If we zoom out here, we can also see all of these peaks that surround this valley. Even extending off of the map, these are some massive peaks out here. If we were to stand here looking south, we probably get all of this interesting foreground, midground of the valley and then in the background, these really amazing tall peaks. Some of these peaks like this one here extends over 14,000 feet in elevation. In contrast, if we look at this smaller lake up here, we probably wouldn't get the same interesting views because if we were to stand on the north end here and look south, we'd really just see a very tall, steep slope. We probably wouldn't get the perspective of seeing all of these surrounding mountains. We probably would just be seeing the lake and then almost like a wall of rock right behind because we see here these contour lines are so closely spaced together, it's probably close to a vertical or nearly vertical slope. If we turn down the opacity here, we can see how steep the terrain is over here. If we were to stand on this end, we would be looking downhill into this valley and it could make for some interesting photographs. But as far as we can tell from this map, we'd probably be buried in this valley and we wouldn't have expansive views. We'd really hit walls on either side and maybe we might not get a nice view of the valley here. But I don't think anything compared to being down here looking south towards the peaks. Again, this is how a topographic map can give you so much information about the best places to shoot because we don't even have to be out there hiking and scouting by foot to know that this area looks a lot more promising at the moment than this area. Now if we wanted to take it a step further, what we could do is explore using Google Earth. I'm going to orient this around towards the south so that we're looking south. Sometimes this Google Earth is a little bit tricky to orient in space, so don't feel bad if you're struggling with that at first. It does take a little bit of practice. We are looking south. Again, we're from that north part of the lake, looking down this valley and we see that we do have this really nice looking valley. The lake is in the foreground. We can get a little bit closer down here and these amazing peaks surrounding the lake. This is Longs Peak, a 14,000-foot peak over here and this just makes for a really nice composition with the valley leading towards these mountains. We'll pull this opacity down just to see the actual landscape. That looks really nice. If you wanted to, you could even come up here and pull this little guide down onto the landscape. Now we can see from a ground-level perspective what this would look like, at least as close as we can get to what this would look like in reality because this looks like a really great place to shoot. Let's exit ground level view and check out that other lake that's down in the valley here. We'll zoom out, we make our way, let's turn our topo map back on so that we can see where we're going. We wanted to check out this lake that was all the way at the top. Green Lake here. Let's pull our lines down once again. You can see that this looks a lot less photogenic. At least the composition is not quite as interesting as the Mills Lake, the lake that we were just at because if we're standing right here, we're just getting like a wall of rock right here. Even though we could hike up here, it probably wouldn't be worth the extra effort. Let's see if we can pull this guide down onto the landscape. This is really pretty, but definitely different than where we were before. I actually like the first place better, which is what we actually predicted originally, just by looking at the topographic map. The key here to understand is once you know how to read a topographic map and identify features on the landscape, just by looking at the patterns of contour lines of ridges and mountains and valleys, canyons, things like that, you have a great starting point of how to brainstorm good places to shoot landscape photographs. This is why I believe that knowing how to read a topographic map is an essential skill for landscape photographers, especially if you're more of an adventurous type and like to do a lot of hiking and backpacking, maybe mountain biking and over landing, things like that. I hope this course has given you a good understanding of how to go about doing that, of how to identify features on the landscape, and have a sense of what might be the best locations to shoot photographs from. With that, we'll start to wrap up this course in one final lesson coming up next. 11. Next steps and conclusion: [MUSIC] Well, that's about it for this course you all. I just want to thank you so much for being here and going on this journey with me to learn how to read topographic maps. I hope at this point, you have a basic understanding of how to read topographic maps. I hope that you can use this information on your next photography adventure to plan your trip and also to use your map when you're out in the field looking for a new photo locations. If you'd like to continue learning with me, I'd love for you to go check out my other courses on Skillshare, which are all aimed at helping you become a better photographer and explore. I will leave a link in the course description of where you can find all of those courses. You can also check out my website where I have a ton of free in-depth guides and resources that will help you become a better photographer as well. Again, friends, I want to thank you so much for being here. Happy adventuring, stay safe out there, and I will see you next time. Take care guys.