Ok Playing with my topo 2008, the 24k north east maps here... they don't have any trails on them .. Is there any free or pay trail compilations that would have most of the blue blazes for this area?
Inclusive trail data does not seam to be available. Try Google searches on specific areas.
There are some websites which are building trail data from user tracks as they submit them.
Others may be able to help you if you say which specific areas you are interested in.
Maine, vermont NH NY and Ct are what I am after mainly
If you are interested in specific trails in the White Mountain National Forest in NH, you can obtain individual trail GPS tracks using the Appalachian Mountain Club's on-line White Mountain Guide. That's a subsciption service ($15/yr for non members). You'll have to go through a few cumbersome steps to get the available data into .gpx format that you can then open in Mapsource and load onto your GPSr. For specific planned hikes I've found the resulting tracks to be quite accurate. It's too bad all that trail data is not available on a single transparent map that could be downloaded. I'm surprised that the AMC hasn't offered something like that for sale since they have obtained all the necessary data, which I understand was developed by actually walking all the trails with a specialized GPSr unit.
I found the gpx for the App. Trail from guymott, which looks great. A search in google for Appalachian trail gpx got me to his site. Very nice.
I hear there is some trail data on the national parks topo? would that be worth buying?
If you looking for some trail gpx there are several websites that offer free gpx. One of them is Backpacker.com. Even though their gpx are gear to backpackers, some of the trails can be used for day hikes. Another site that ordinary people contribute their gpx is Everytrail. This website is gear to cell phone gps, but there are still wonderful hikes on the site.
Enjoy
I don't really want a gpx , a transparent map would be ideal
I suppose it would be alot of work to make one
What kind of GPS do you have? If you have a newer model (Oregon, Colorado, Dakota, GPSMap 78 or 62) you can make custom maps from the PDF's on the National Parks site here: http://home.nps.gov/applications/hafe/hfc/carto.cfm