Weyerhaeuser Road Maps

[gingival]

Does anyone know if there are any downloadable road maps of the Weyerhaeuser tree farms in Washington state?  I have their printed road maps but would love to have them on my Garmin Rino if at all possible!  Any help would be greatly appreciated!  Thank you in advance

[maps4gps]

Have you tried asking Wayerhaeuser if they make the data available in a digital format, ie. ESRI shape files, etc. ?

[gingival]

I have not asked.  I have not made any maps before so I did not know what to ask.  I will look into it and see!  Thank you for the reply!

[Boyd]

If you aren't technically inclined, and if you don't have the patience to spend a lot of time learning then you may find that making your own maps isn't for you. It isn't easy. The most user-friendly program for creating Garmin maps is Mapwel: http://mapwel.eu/ If you can find shapefiles, it can import them and turn them into a map. But many people will still find the process bewildering.

The problem is that Garmin does not support any of this officially. They consider their map format proprietary and don't sanction third party tools like this (although they have not done anything to prevent us from using them).

Newer Garmin units support a feature called "custom maps" which is Garmin's "nod" to people who want to make their own maps. It is pretty easy to use, but is limited in the size (area covered) of the map. It is only supported on the Oregon, Colorado, Dakota, GPSMap 62 and GPSMap 78 series however. If you have one of these units, take a look at Garmin's tutorial here. It might allow you to scan your paper maps and use them on the GPS: http://www.garmin.com/garmin/cms/site/us/onthetrail/custommaps

There are several shareware/freeware programs that can help with making this sort of map. If you have one of the units mentioned above, we can help you get up to speed with this.

[Seldom]

Custom maps won't work on a Rino, though.  Too bad, because gingival could align a raster graphic of the road map in Google Earth, and export that to one of the newer Garmin devices Boyd lists.

[Boyd]

Oops - didn't notice that detail from the OP....