Topo

What it shows

Topo is the map Goat Maps opens on. We designed it from scratch for the backcountry, so trails and tracks are easy to pick out against the terrain, and it's the same map on the web and in the iPhone app.

• Trails, drawn by how hard they are: ordinary trails, difficult trails, climbing routes, steps and walkways, with the names of long-distance trails.
• Roads and tracks, with unpaved roads, tracks and roads closed to the public drawn differently, plus fords, bridges and route shields.
• Contour lines with elevation labels, in feet or meters depending on your units setting.
• Hillshade, so you can read the shape of the land at a glance.
• Land cover: forest, bare rock, snow and glaciers, wetlands and water, including streams and lakes that are only there part of the year.
• Outdoor points of interest: peaks and saddles, springs and drinking water, campsites, trailheads, huts and shelters.
• Ski runs, colored by difficulty, and aerial lifts.
• Parks, protected areas and indigenous lands, boundaries down to counties, and names from mountain ranges down to hamlets. Zoomed all the way in, it shows buildings and house numbers.

The full legend, with every color and icon, is in the map legends help article.

Where the data comes from

• Roads, trails, places and points of interest: OpenStreetMap, the map anyone can edit. A trail someone adds or fixes in OpenStreetMap shows up in Goat Maps the next time we rebuild the map.
• Land cover: ESA WorldCover 2021, a 10 m map of the whole world made from Sentinel satellite imagery, combined with OpenStreetMap.
• Mountain range names: the GMBA Mountain Inventory from the Global Mountain Biodiversity Assessment.
• Addresses: Overture Maps.
• Elevation, for the contours and hillshade: Terrain Tiles on AWS Open Data, which blend USGS 3DEP (10 m across most of the United States), SRTM, GMTED2010, ETOPO1 and national elevation models such as EU-DEM and Canada's CDEM.

Contours and hillshade

The contour lines aren't downloaded as a separate map. Goat Maps draws them from the elevation data on your device, so they follow your units setting: every 10 m in metric and every 40 ft in imperial, with a darker index line every few lines. Index lines appear from zoom 9, and the lines between them from zoom 13.

When you're zoomed far out, the hillshade is pre-rendered. From zoom 8 in, it's drawn from the same elevation data as the contours.

Coverage

The whole world. Detail depends on OpenStreetMap, which is very good across North America and Europe and thinner in some remote areas. If a trail you know is missing, you can add it to OpenStreetMap and it'll appear in a later version of the map.

Offline

Topo is free to view on the web and on iPhone. With a membership, you can download it for offline use in the iPhone app, contours and hillshade included.