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usgs-ustopo

USGS US Topo 7.5-minute map sheets for your US map regions, verified

What it does

Downloads the USGS US Topo map sheets covering your map regions -- the current 7.5-minute series, one sheet for every eighth of a degree of latitude and longitude -- as GeoTIFFs from USGS's own bucket, checks each, and keeps them under /usr/local/share/hammunition/data/usgs-ustopo/. A sheet is the printed topographic map: named trails (National Park Service and Forest Service trails by their official names), campgrounds, visitor centres, roads, water, woodland and 40 ft contours, drawn by USGS. ustopo-qmapshack makes one QMapShack map of them.

Why you would want it

OpenStreetMap already has nearly every trail's line, but not always the name on the signpost or the look people trust on paper. US Topo is the official map, public domain, and on the disk it works with no network -- the same sheet a search team or a ranger station hands out.

Before it will work

Map regions set in station config, and a grid square: the sheets are those of your regions within a radius of the grid square's centre, 100 km unless station set --topo-radius-km N says otherwise (0 selects none). --topo-regions a,b narrows to some of your regions, taken whole unless a radius is also set; --topo-all takes every sheet of every region, and the install then prints the count and size and asks you to type yes, which --yes does not answer; so does any selection over 10 GB. With no regions set this unit is deferred by name; with no grid square (and neither --topo-all nor --topo-regions) it is deferred by name too and what is installed is kept. Only regions in the United States and its territories have sheets; a region elsewhere gets none, and the plan says so without failing.

How it installs

  • topographic map sheets from usgs-ustopo for the regions in station config (Public domain (USGS), https://www.usgs.gov/information-policies-and-instructions/copyrights-and-credits)

Known problems

Narrowing the bound removes the installed sheets that fall outside it on the next install, and the plan says how many; --topo-all keeps them. A sheet is 2 to 20 MB, about 8 MB typically. Measured on 2026-09-29 from the index: Delaware's 38 sheets are about 220 MB, Vermont's 194 about 1.6 GB, Virginia's 729 about 6 GB; a region's outline also touches sheets across its borders. The plan prints the count and size per region before anything downloads. Each sheet is checked against the MD5 in the publisher's object metadata (its S3 ETag, carried in the index and asked for again before the download), which catches a damaged download, not a deliberately altered one; the plan says "MD5 from the publisher's object metadata; not pinned by Hammunition" for every sheet. For 817 quads (2026-09-29) the newest edition is published as a PDF only, and the index carries the newest GeoTIFF edition instead. The first install of a region asks Geofabrik for its outline to choose its sheets and remembers the answer; until then, every plan, a dry run included, asks again. Sheet names are places, so they are shown in the plan only.

Keeping it current

  • probe: none
  • strategy: reinstall
  • USGS revises a quad every few years (Vermont's current edition is 2024, Delaware's 2023). hammunition update counts the installed sheets the carried index has replaced with a newer edition; installing again fetches those and removes the older ones.

Where to get help with the software itself

USGS's US Topo pages (https://www.usgs.gov/programs/national-geospatial-program/us-topo-maps-america) and The National Map's help desk for the maps themselves.

Source: catalog/packages/usgs-ustopo.yaml