So the upshot is that with a free app for your iOS or Android phone you can download and view a lot of the USFS maps. The app also works as a GPS. The big maps that the USFS sells are about $5 digitally, everything else is usually free.
So for riding you can get free copies of the MVUM maps which show which roads are open and to what kind of vehicles.
You can also buy other maps from small map publishers. But here's the cool part:
and find the topo map you want. You'll need the 'geopdf' version - either copy the URL and paste it into the app, or if you're not on your phone you can download the map to your computer and load it on the phone using DropBox.
Also, if you live in Colorado and somehow haven't seen it yet, my map of gravel roads works nicely on phones:
I first got the road GIS data from the Colorado DOT. Then using QGIS I exported out the roads that were classified as dirt an gravel to new shapefiles.
The shapefiles were loaded in TileMill to generate the clear map tiles with orange roads to an .mbtiles file. From mbtiles they were converted to .png and uploaded them to Amazon S3 using a custom Python script.
The web map runs the latest version of Leaflet to manage the different layers, handle geolocation, etc.
It gets better - you can go to the USGS store at http://store.usgs.gov and browse for topo maps. You'll notice that on each maps page, it says Click on the image for a more detailed view of the product. Turns out that the 'preview' is a geo-pdf file and you can load it in PDF Maps too!
