I strongly prefer Voyageur maps. I've found very few errors, and the ones I did find were inconsequential. The two McKenzie maps I've used had serious print registration problems. The contour lines and some of the lake boundaries were off by as much as 1/8" which translates to about 50 feet. It makes the map very confusing to read.

Being somewhat of a map fan, I can’t resist commenting on this.

When I started canoeing in the early 90’s, I purchased about all the map types available – McKenzie, Fisher, Canadian and U.S. topos, etc. and then when digital maps came out, I purchased several of these – namely ETOPO, CANTOPO, and TOURATECH. Since Paddle Planner entered my life, I’ve put all the old stuff away. After a while, the paper stuff found its way to recycling and the digital stuff hasn’t been opened for years and years.

Using Paddle Planner’s maps with Trimble MyTopo background, planning a route on a reasonably sized monitor is a pretty nice experience. Having the 1 km grid allows quickly making a rough estimate of a distance. Whether you need a grid or not, the campsite and portage data on the Paddle Planner maps are pretty darn up to date and accurate because of the contributions of people who are out there in woods and is certainly better than is possible on some printed document that was put in print years ago.

There is another gigantic advantage of using Paddle Planner to plan trips: The photo feature! People like me have posted photos of some portages so you can see what the entry looks like from the water and/or see how much fun the portage actually is.

Back in the 90’s when I started canoeing it didn’t take long to see the problems with using big paper maps outside – they needed to be folded and refolded and the scale was generally too small. An even bigger problem came to light on a trip in Woodland Caribou when one big lake with lots of islands and bays was centered on the intersection of 4 quadrangles. (As a result, we got really screwed up.)

It didn’t take me too long to solve the problem. Out on the lakes and in the woods I use 8.5 x 11 maplets on waterproof paper printed both sides. These maplets typically hold about 7 x 9 km of terrain. I’ve found this particular scale reasonably readable with my 70+ year-old eyeballs.I make overlapping maplets of my entire route and pay particular attention to having a maplet to cover tricky geography.

While paddling, I have the maplets in a waterproof case with a window on one side. The case is buckled to the crossbar immediately in front of me. On portages, I just leave it buckled to the crossbar.

I used to make the maplets by screen grabbing from a composite of topo maps on which I had entered campsite and portage info. But now that there is a background with grid on Paddle Planner, my future canoeing maplets will be screen grabs from there.

Incidentally, I also use maplets for hiking and ski touring here at home in Switzerland. These I get from screen grabs on the schweizmobil.ch website. The route planning aid of distance calculation is similar to that on Paddle Planner.