News & Updates

Version 14 is now live for all Map Series; Nationally at 1:250k, Qld, NSW, Vic, Tas, SA and NT at 75k and 25k in NSW and Vic.

You’ll see contour lines in all states and territories (50m contours at 75k and 10m contours at 25k), some new track info, over 10,000 camp sites along with huts and ruins.

The biggest change is the satellite underlay, which we are trying out for the first time in this level of detail. It’s unlike any other map available, offering you a full topo map over a subdued satellite and hillshade background. Hopefully we got the balance right and made it as usable as possible.

Victoria 25k now includes the newly released (yesterday) 2020 bushfire data. We will also be putting together a 250k Bushfire map set which will show the 2019-20 bushfires in even more clarity, specifically for those wishing to plan around them. This will be out in a week or so.

All maps are now on the website, and have been sent to Avenza where most are already active and the rest will be shortly.

UPDATE

Version 14b removes the satellite layer, which made the map too dark in some places. It will be tweaked and we hope to issue a version with a satellite layer again soon.

Queensland is complete at 1:75,000 in 140 large sheets. It joins NSW, Vic and Tas also all available at that scale. The rest of the country is still at 250k for now.

Qld track and other data is fairly good, with only index contours visible at 75k as we do in other states at this scale. The tracks are a mixture of three different sources, all of which are absolutely useless on their own, but when all represented together form a useful map. You’ll see them independently resented in red, black and purple. The whole state is 140 large sheets – it was either that or cut it up into 750 sheets, which seemed like a lot. Turns out, Qld is quite large.

Hillshade and Resolution Improved

As part of building Qld, we put together a national, high resolution hill-shade layer. We then applied this to all the other series as well.

This allowed us to re-issue NSW, Vic and Tas at a higher resolution than we were able to before; up from 160 to 220 dpi. This makes them much clearer, especially when zoomed in. You’ll find them all now available at V12a.

Both Qld and the newly high-res and hillshaded series are all ready for download on the website. Avenza has them as well with most ready to go already and the rest live in a day or two.

DOWNLOAD HERE

Thank you

A big thank you to everyone who has donated to the project. It didn’t cover the new costs but it certainly helped.

We purchased the new computer, which is what allowed us to produce Qld and Tasmania and improve all the other series without it taking a month of processing time.

We also upgraded our online storage to a more expensive plan to be able to deliver all these maps, with over 350Gb of them now available to download.

If you would like to contribute to the project and help us pay for ongoing updates and development, it would be very much appreciated. We hope to keep expanding and do the whole country in free topo maps as soon as we can!

DONATE HERE

Version 11 (Victoria) is now being produced.

It will come in three scales;

• 1:75,000 will be put on the old 1:100k mapsheets (which cover the state in 70 sheets), complete with their pretty new relief shading as well as 100m contours.
• 1:25,0000 will come out on the old 1:50k mapsheets, with the state on 431 sheets.
• A new 1:250,000 series will be produced, in a few sheets as possible, with the intention being that the whole country can be produced at this scale first even before we drill down in each State

New in V11:

• Relief shading added to smaller scales making things a bit easier to visualise
• EVEN MORE huts, campsites and ruins marked
• Huts and Ruins have dates where known – huts have construction dates, ruins have construction and destruction dates and names of what was there, where we have the data
• Seasonal Road Closures have the dates on them, both open and close, because they vary a surprising amount (up to 6 weeks difference between tracks in some areas)
• Hunting information, including where deer and where ferals can be taken on state land. These sometimes overlap, but we have been surprised at some places they don’t (eg you can hunt deer, but not rabbits in much of the state forest in the Thompson Dam catchment – all that area south of the Matlock road)
• Ferry routes added
• Various clarity and overlay improvements making things clearer

The full sets are still a week or two away, but you can check out the demo maps as they come, here.

Taswegians! Version 0.1 is ready.

This is a pre-production version, so it is not at every scale or in every format, and it still needs work, but it’s quite usable for many purposes – I’m using it right now! It’s on big sheets (250k index sheets) but the actual scale is about 1:75,000, which is around 10m per pixel. It has shaded relief but this one doesn’t have contours (they double the time it takes to ‘print’ it out).

It has most of what you’d expect from a Getlost Map; all the roads, tracks and paths I could find, national parks and conservation reserves, timber harvesting and game reserves, rivers, lakes and more. It has a forest layer, and then a new Tea-tree (sp leptospermum) layer which I’m told is where you’d find a Tasmanian Deer.

Some quite a few things are missing at the moment; Town names for starters, many of the points of interest like huts and campsites … I have them, don’t worry, they’re just not on this print. There are also a bunch of walking tracks missing which I will need to track down, because I know I have the data, but it didn’t seem to print. Some of this is finding the happy medium between different data sources and getting use to how much I can rely on the Tas Govt data.

With that aside, I’m happy to take any feedback you might have!

Download from here.

Full Australian coverage Getlost Maps are at Version not-quite-1, but they are coming along.

They’re not very data-rich yet, so there isn’t much point it doing them below 1:100k at this point, but what I could do is cover the entire country at 1:100k, delivered in big 1:250k mapsheets like this test map linked below.

Demo map at their current level of development is HERE (JPG).

The question is; would people want them at this stage of development, or would they rather wait until the maps are closer in features to the Victorian set?

Comment below or on our Facebook page!

Index Maps

The index file doesn’t change much, so it hasn’t been updated since V8 – but it has now been refreshed. It should be clearer and easier to use in its new form. It’s been sent to Avenza and is also available through The Map Table.

Special Maps

We’ve refreshed the Special Maps to include the new symbology for walking tracks, updated special seasonal road closures and other improvements. For example, the Mt Buffalo map now shows the special seasonal closures they do up there, which are not included on the list of Seasonal Closures released by DELWP. A similar closure system applies to Falls Creek which doesn’t show up without manually inserting it, which we’ve now done.

We’ve also added a new Special for the Buangor State Forest and surrounds. Did you know there are several huts in there?

Also updated are the Large Maps – the entire state at 100k and the state in two maps at 50k, in OziExplorer format.

If you download your maps through Avenza using their ‘map store’ (ie not by manually importing them) your copies should offer to update themselves. For every other method, replace your existing maps with the new ones at The Map Table.

We’ve started our expansion into mapping New South Wales, as part of the broader project to map the whole country.

It was always the plan to one day map the whole of Australia, but each state has its own challenges around accessing suitable data, matching formats, licensing, private land designation, data quality etc. NSW has some weird stuff around exclusive use licenses covering some state forests, so we’ll need to sort that out.

As with Vic, we’ll be using a multi-layered combined data approach, to try to make up for the gaps in each dataset. If one source says the road goes left and another says it goes right, I’d rather just give you both than try to guess which is true. How much variation there is … had to know until we get into it.

Wish us luck!

Huts.

You would not believe how hard it is to get solid Hut data!

I pulled the Vic Gov list – it’s about 100 huts, 1/3 of them are not even there, and HEAPS are missing. I pulled data from several lists I found online, and added every hut I’ve ever been to, looked up track notes, removed those reported destroyed. Some of them are in NSW around the border, but most are in Vic.

I then went through every record, plotted each one, manually removed duplications, looked up every one in 3 sources of satellite imagery, corrected locations, relabelled some as ruins, and any I couldn’t find from the satellite image but can’t be sure has burned down I labelled as (approx).

I have 341 Huts now, not including ruins, most of them in Vic, some in adjoining areas.

Feel free to download the waypoint file that I COULD NOT FIND ANYWHERE, but I thought should exist, so I built it myself – just like the maps. The file is provided as a GPX which should work most places, and a WPT for OziExplorer.

If you have any that I’ve missed, or if I’ve made any other mistakes please let me know.

Download the waypoint file here.

Skiing Mountains, including Falls, Buller, Hotham, Bawbaw and Lake Mountain have been added to the Special Maps folder. They’ve also been sent to Avenza.

They’re scaled and built to make the ski runs and tracks clear: 1:8,000 – 1:10,000, some of the extraneous details removed. Last year we had tens of thousands of maps downloaded of ski resort areas, so this year we decided to purpose-build maps for those people.

They’re done and are uploading. They’ll be available in all formats shortly.

Download at The Map Table

V8b has a bunch of improvements, and some new map types.

• Brand new 1:100k map of the entire state of Victoria, on one sheet, in OZF format for OziExplorer
• 100k layer made clearer and simpler for route planning
• 1:50k mapset replaced
• New campsites and other points of interest
• Walking tracks plotted with more clarity in pink rather than red
• Shading changes to several layers for clarity and to stop them bunching up
• UTM grid made smaller and lighter
• New Index maps

As always, maps are on The Map Table, and will be in Avenza shortly.

To help with Easter 2019 trip planning, we’ve taken the map produced by Parks on 9 April, then calibrated and converted it for use in OziExplorer. It’s available in JPG and OZF formats with .map files.

DOWLOAD FROM HERE

Version 8.1 is now complete and published in all formats, incorporating corrections of those few niggling errors from 8.0.

All data is refreshed, plus new layers in this version include:

• Last Logged [year]
• Old Growth forest
• Wetlands
• Fire towers and radio repeaters
• Water Points
• Historical sites
• Master Contours

Download JPG, GeoTIFF and OZF at The Map Table or visit the Avenza Store.

It’s been 6 months since V7 maps were sent out into the world.

With over half a million maps downloaded, it seems like some people found them handy. The snow season saw huge numbers of people pulling maps of ski resort areas, hopefully helping them get home safely.

In V8 all existing data has been refreshed, so that’s roads, tracks, park boundaries and OSM roads so you still have that second source for track data out where government employees with power to correct map data fear to tread.

New in Version 8

• Freeways and Highways look different to other roads so they stand out
• Last Burned layer so you can manage your expectations about that great campsite you remember from 1997 (eg “Bushfire 2003”)
• Last Logged Year (eg “LL:2017”) for much the same reason as above. Nothing like rocking up to that nice spot beside the creek to find the area looking like Tunguska in 1909
• Wetland layer to find the swampy bits
• Historical landmarks with labels – some new places to explore
• Transmission lines, because they’re a visible landmark
• Old Growth overlay (“OG”) if you’re looking for real trees instead of modern reproductions
• Tweaks to POIs, including waterfalls, caves, picnic tables and shelters, fire towers, radio repeaters, ruins, water points, tanks, quarries (some of them make reasonable emergency fire refuges) and other bits and pieces
• Masterlines for the contours; every 100m the contour lines are thicker than normal ones.
• 1:100k version, with some features removed for clarity, including most of the contour lines – masterlines only. Some other features also removed to make a cleaner map to suit the scale. Good for route planning through the shrubbery as all tracks are still there, terrible for built up areas or places with too many tracks and features.

Timetable

100k set is done (JPG), which will be followed by the GeoTIFF conversion, then Ozi. Then we move to 25k. Last we upload everything to Avenza. Give it a week to 10 days to get everything where it needs to be, so expect it all available before Easter for those heading out for the long weekend.

Index file will be refreshed and will include the map key which somehow got lost on V7.

As usual, the download info is over at The Map Table.

Corrections

There will be errors. The 100k set will have teething problems for sure. I’m not sure that it likes coastlines … the index looks like a dog’s breakfast down south, but we’ll see how we go.

Seasonal closures don’t get announced until May, and then we’ll request the shapefile so we can do a V8.1 refresh to incorporate the new data and replace the old.

Donations

A massive thank you to everyone who threw us a dollar or three!

We’ve paid for the hosting and bandwidth for 2018 so I’m no longer getting looks from my wife about spending her money on top of the hundreds of hours to get this project started.

If you like the maps and want to support 2019’s costs or just want to buy us a beer, the donation info is here.