Hiking trail maps

[kingdaddy]

Are there any maps that will load on my nuvi 265wt that show popular hiking trails?  I thought the Texas Topo map would do that but it doesn't.  I know Garmin makes some but they are expensive, any others, possibly for free?

[maps4gps]

What trails may be in the TX mapset are what Census coded as 'trail'.  Not many, as few people live along trails, therefore it would not be of great concern for Census purposes.

Little trail data that can be used for a map is available.
Some Garmin products advertise they have trail data when they do not.
There are some sites which collect trail data from submitted track logs; I do not recall one for TX.

I am working on an overlay mapset of the trails shown on the USGS 100k topos.

[geness]

This is kind of what I am trying to do but I don't know how to do it. I have Garmin Topos and 3rd party, "home made" topos.  I also have track logs in GDB and GPX formats of many of the trails that I backpack.  What I would like to do is convert the track logs to trails and put them on the topos that are loaded in my Garmin GPS Map 60 CSX.  I don't want to load the track logs themselves because in many cases they use up most of the available track log samples that the Garmin will hold. 

Help!

Gene

[maps4gps]

I have never tried to do this, however others have.

Last week there was some discussion on forums.groundspeak.com under GPS and Technology.
Some editing software, etc. was mentioned.
I did not pay it much attention.

At a test, I took a track log, opened it in GM and saved it as an MP file.  No editing, but is was a simple process.  There must be some free 'specialized' software which could to the same.  It appears gpsmapedit considers the .gpx a series of points (which it is), but GM recognizes it as points forming track(s) (lines).

You would probaly want to do some editing of the points and have each trail as a seperate file.
You would then combine these into a single .mp file and use cgpsmapper to compile an .img file as an overlay/transparency.  Then use MapSetToolKit to install the mapset into MapSource.  Unless you had a CO, OR, or DK GPSr, you would have to rebuild the gmapsupp.img in MapSource everytime you updated .img file with the trails.

Hopefully others can help you with suggestions on the initial data editing, etc.

[Boyd]

Have a look at Mapwel: http://www.mapwel.eu/. It should be able to open the .gpx files and turn them into a garmin map with a transparent background. Unlike other programs, it's an all in one solution - editor and compiler in the same program. The free trial should have all features available on your PC, but will only upload partial maps to the GPS until you register it.

As far as editing the .gpx files, that's not something I do very often so no suggestions there. But Mapwel should turn them into Garmin maps which you can enable along with any other Topo's that you're using.

[kingdaddy]

Already have that program, cant add waypoints to the map and download to a Nuvi WT265 so it doesn't do much good, wish there was a work around.