About Our Maps

Saint Clair Mapping’s Great Smoky Mountains stream and trail maps are our enhancements of portions of one or more of the digitized United States Geological Survey (USGS) 7.5 Minute-Series topographic maps of the twenty one quadrangles in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Enhancements include scale adjustments, shaded relief, 30 second latitude and longitude coordinates, Universal Transverse Mercator (UTM) coordinate system grid overlay, highlighting of trails, trail names and distance markers, backcountry campsites, pictograms of landforms and facilities, stream crossings descriptions and game fish species color coding.

Certain boundaries, trail routes, locations, names of facilities, etc., that appear on the quads may have changed, or partly or fully vanished from sight since the time the quads were produced by USGS as early as the mid-1940s. In general, these have been left as is on our maps. In cases in which such might cause confusion, we have placed masks over the out of date items. An example of this is a quad designating a trail as a “Bridle Path” that has subsequently been made inaccessible to horses. Recent man-made feature changes or additions are not necessarily reflected in our illustrations. Any features shown outside the park boundary could be significantly out of date. The unavoidable variation in the color and clarity of the backgrounds from one map to another is due to a number of factors including differences in the original publication and how they were scanned by USGS and, to a lesser degree, the variation in printers used to produce our maps.

Latitude/longitude and UTM coordinates are located along the maps borders. In addition to the border coordinates, a 1000 meter UTM grid, Zone 17 S is located throughout the map. When used with map datum NAD 27, these enhanced coordinates provide a location fix with an accuracy approaching that of the digitized USGS quads from which it they were manually derived. Visitors to the park should use our maps in conjunction with, at the very least, the official Great Smoky Mountains Trail Map and Guide available through the visitor centers and online via www.nps.gov/grsm. Before planning a backcountry trip, read through the trail closures and warnings page of the park web site.

Our maps are all large scale, none over 1:24,000 and averaging approximately 1:20,000. Compare this to that of Great Smoky Mountains National Park Trails IllustratedMap™* No. 229 at approximately 1:70,000. The average scale of our maps is roughly twice that of even Trails Illiustrated's new set of two maps (No. 316 & No. 317) covering the park. They have a scale of approximately 1:40,000.

Somewhat out of laziness, a standard legend template is used to describe color coding of waters that likely hold fish. No, you can’t expect to get into specks in Abrams nor bass in Beach Flats Prong. What we do is clear the “NA” as appropriate from map to map. The example above applies to Lower Deep Creek. The original basis for our color coding begun in 2009 was solely the trout distribution map from data collected by the National Park Service fishery biologists done primarily in the previous decade. Because of the ever changing range of the trout species due to drought and wet weather year extremes, we now rely on information from:

• books, articles & blogs by noted authors we know personally
• “flyrod data” sources with whom we are personally acquainted (and our own)
• recent National Park Service Fisheries Management news releases and comments at public meetings

Acknowledgments

Considerable resources for our maps and this web site were provided in the public domain by the National Park Service and the United States Geological Survey. We have in no way sought to be endorsed by either of these agencies.

We also acknowledge valuable insights gained from, but not limited to:

• Jim Casada's Fly Fishing in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park: An Insider’s Guide to A Pursuit of Passion
• H. Lea Lawrence's The Fly Fisherman's Guide to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park
• Russ Manning's 100 Hikes of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park
• Ian Rutter's Great Smoky Mountains National Park Angler's Companion
• Jimmy Jacob's Trout Streams of Southern Appalachia
• Don Kirk's Smoky Mountains Trout Fishing Guide
• Waterfalls of the Smokies by Hal Hubbs, Charles Maynard & David Morris
• Contributors to the Little River Outfitters Message Board
• Richard Sellers, an active member of “Friends of the Smokies” and a Smokies stream names researcher.