The new nature is opening up this weekend.

* Guides trip to Agua Caliente County Park. The weather was perfect and made for a great time at the mud caves and on the Moonlight Trail. Bengt's pinewood racer was the 3rd fastest in the tribe and he made the nation finals where he got the second round. The ranger was a bit persnickety and made us douse the campfires way too early.


* Walked dog at San Elijo Lagoon.

The kids and I have been going to Camp Marston near Julian for several years now. I always wanted my wife to go to see what all the fuss was about. It turns out that the camp has a Woodcutters Weekend that families can attend. Your family gets to stay at the camp at no charge, but in return you have to cut wood, literally. We spend 8 hours on Saturday and a few more on Sunday turning big pieces of wood into little pieces wood.
Here is a before picture of the wood pile.

Here is the after picture of the pile; it is more impressive in person.

The family operating dangerous machinery

* Hiked Calaveras Mountain for the first time. We didn't make it to the top this time but plan to in the near future. I give the city of Carlsbad two years max before they develop this land.

* Hiked Elfin Forest Reserve for the first time.



* Adventure Guides event at Indian Hills.

I wanted to teach my son how to use a compass, something I learned back in my pre-GPS Boy Scout days. I started digging on USGS topographical maps. They finished with the basic mapping project in 1992 and are now in update mode. Their website doesn't give a lot of detail, but they said they will update the maps that have the greatest interest. Most of the maps around San Diego were updated in 1997 (except for the Encinitas one which was updated in 1975 making it fairly useless).
The USGS does offer free scans of the maps. Here is a good blog post on how to download the PDF's of the maps. I tried to print them out on regular paper but Adobe couldn't tile the larger image onto 8.5x11 paper, it just printed a scaled image or a single tile. The only way I could use regular sized paper was to select the area of the map I wanted and print only that selection (note that Foxit Reader does not offer this feature). It was trial and error to get the selection to fit onto one page, otherwise it would be cropped. I actually taped a couple pages together to get a usable map this way.
I still might buy software which I assume solves all these problems, but I would really like to find out if they update their maps more than the USGS or just use the same ones.