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Outdoor enthusiasts: your adventure is waiting — in vivid detail. TOPO U.S. 24K West DVD brings you the highest level of topographic detail available, with maps comparable to 1:24,000 scale USGS maps. These highly detailed maps on DVD include terrain contours, topo elevations, summits, routable roads and trails, parks, coastlines, rivers, lakes and geographical points — and they also display 3-D terrain shading on compatible devices. With routable roads and trails in metropolitan and rural areas, getting to your destination is easy by creating point-to-point routes on compatible units. With this purchase, you'll receive topographic detail for Washington, Oregon, California and Nevada. You'll also receive BaseCamp™ software for managing data on your GPS and computer, playing back routes and tracks, geotagging photos and more.

User Reviews about Garmin MapSource TOPO! US 24k West Topographic Coverage for Washington - Oregon - California - and Nevada (DVD)

If you use a Garmin GPS off-road in the US you'll want this disc and/or its companions for other areas & will not want to do without it. Also on the positive side, it installs easily.

That said, however, there's plenty to grumble about. For one, it's characteristically extortionately expensive. At ~$100 for 4 states it will cost you $200-$300 to get regional coverage and about $1000 for the entire US. The mapping application delivered with the data, Base Camp, is not only different from Garmin's heretofore standard mapping application, MapSource, and is delivered without documentation (confusing on both counts!) but is also second-rate (as is, btw. MapSource). The 24K topo discs are also very late: Garmin should have made these discs available 5-10 years ago.

When it comes down to it Garmin is first and foremost a hardware company whose primary customer base consists of drivers using primary and secondary streets and highways. For Garmin the production of sophisticated software for hikers, horsemen & horsewomen, and off-road drivers has always been and always will be a sideline. So go out in the woods & eat dirt. -- Indispensible, BUT...

Auto routing yes. Universal single use mapping trails great, except Garmin chose brown elevation lines and brown city roads. In parts of San Francisco distinguishing streets from a high fill of elevation lines is not that feasible. As far as preparing to write to a Micro SD card a "Core 2 Duo 6300" took 6 hours to prepare a single 8 min write. "Quad Core 9550" more than 4 hours. More than twice the estimated displayed. Also firmware update for Etrex and 60CSX allowing a 4 gig card, not quite enough capacity for CA NA OR WA 24K. I made a special card part City Navigator NT part Topo 24k. City Navigator NT disables elevation lines when active. California is two map files on NT (from map, hit menu, select setup map, check or uncheck NT map for your city needs). Topo 24K is a separate map file for a zillion USGS Quad maps. By the way, even the older City Navigator maps cover some roads in Death Vally that require experienced 4WD operators (Stripped Butte Valley Rd). -- Usable in Flat terain cities