Northern California Atlas & Gazetteer: Detailed Topographic Maps

User Review: - Delorme Atlas & Gazetter
These Delorme Atlas & Gazetters are wondeful. They show you many features not available through GPS, maps or other atlases. It is a great feature to have the BLM lands marked as well as the back roads. Good resources are also included in each states atlas. A good addition to anyone's travel tools.

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User Review: - Great map, even if only half the state
I love the gazetter series and all the detail they provide! This map and others have come in handy so many times. It's kind of a bummer that California is such a large state that two separate books are needed.

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User Review: - The Best For Wilderness Travel
For wilderness travel the Delorme atlases are the best maps I've found to have in your pack aside from a backpack full of USGS and Forest Service maps. If you're interested in a road atlas, something to use while traveling around in the safety of your vehicle, then get a Thomas Guide (the best ROAD atlases in the world). The Delorme atlases show you all the land features, topography, public lands boundaries, and waterways (even the minor and intermittent ones). I've used three of these atlases while traveling on foot through the national forests, and they have literally saved my life many times. The one and only complaint I have about these atlases are their size; they're huge, and for an atlas whose contents seem to be designed for wilderness travel that large size just sucks when trying to find pack space for it. Fortunately, they fold in half easily, which helps a lot.

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User Review: - Comprehensively useless.
A quick glance at this atlas, and it looks impressive. - Gradients, vegetation, and what appears to be every road and track that covers the state. BUT....

This atlas does a poor job at visually separating major roads from minor roads, and makes no effort whatsoever to separate disused tracks and footpaths from well used, well signed, dirt roads that can be driven by a family car.

Case in point. - The M-10 is a signed and posted road from Ukiah to Williams. - It is well travelled and graded (unpaved) for about 30 miles. Yet, it is undistinguishable in this map from a hiking trails in the Snow Mountain wilderness nearby.

I've tried to use this atlas a number of times to follow lesser roads, dirt roads and fire roads accross, and have found it largely unreliable and unusable. It has probably been created from satellite photos with little checking on what is actually passable on the ground. - Much much better is the Benchmark California Road & Recreation Atlas.

The Delorme book is good at showing vegetation, campsites, boat launches, rivers and drainage basins. Elevations, oddly, are in meters.

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User Review: - Just like all Delorme Atlases, it's great
I'm planning a trip to California shortly, but I lived there for many years as a child. The Delorme for Northern California joins my collection of about 10 other Delorme maps for other areas I have lived and visited. Being a birdwatcher, we in the birding community often give directions to birds by Delorme pages. Makes life SO much easier. Although it doesn't have every little street in some areas, it does have MUCH more detail than the average road map, and makes it wonderful when you're like me and just want to head off in a general direction to scout for bird territory, but not necessarily follow the same path back. Love Delorme Atlases... wouldn't travel without them.

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