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Review | National Park Maps

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By Kurt Repanshek - February 15th, 2023
National Park Maps

As nice as those folding park maps you get when driving into a national park are, trying to collect them all and organize them for your road trips can be a challenge, to say the least. Sure, you could punch holes in them and cram them into a three-ring binder, but an easier approach to exploring the parks on road trips is National Park Maps ($20), a forthcoming atlas of the 63 "national parks."

Compiled by Michael Joseph Oswald, author of Your Guide To The National Parks, this nearly 200-page full color atlas goes beyond simply reprinting park maps. Oswald opens with snapshot profiles of the 63 parks and includes regional maps of the United States so you can gain some perspective of where parks are in relation to major cities and even other parks.

Each park "chapter" is sprinkled with trivia tied to that specific park. For instance, in the Acadia chapter you'll find such subtopics as What You Need To Know About Acadia, Acadia Favorites (a short list of Oswald's fave hikes and views in the park), Why Visit Acadia (key activities), and How Much Time Do You Have, a short primer on how you can spend one, two, or three days in the park. He also includes helpful mileage information that shows you how close you are to other national parks in the region (e.g., Rocky Mountain National Park to Great Sand Dunes National Park is 275 miles, or about 5.5 hours.)

He also drops important tidbits in each chapter, such as park speed limits, winter road closures, backcountry use and more. On the park maps he also pinpoints great hikes that you should consider.

Drawbacks? I'm a proponent of putting in a couple blank pages to guidebooks to allow you to jot down notes. That could be helpful with this guide. And maybe a small window in each chapter where you could stamp your park-specific postmark  

I have to admire what Oswald has done. He's a one-man publishing house (Stone Road Press) who churns out user friendly park-related publications. In addition to Your Guide To The National Parks and National Park Maps, he's working on The Dayhiker's Guide To The National Parks. And he's printing his projects in the United States, without corporate backing.

I'm not sure he's getting rich at it, but he's certainly having a lot of fun while creating information-rich publications.

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