Navigate the Past

History Becomes an Adventure

Only for iPhone

Free · Designed for iPhone. Not verified for macOS.

iPhone

Some quadrangles were printed fifteen times between 1900 and 1975. Every one survives as a scan. Stand on the ground and flip through the lot. The USGS has been mapping the same ground over and over since the 1880s, and every printing survives as a scan. Navigate the Past puts all of them in one stack, oldest at the bottom, and hands you a GPS so you can go and stand on a trail that stopped being drawn in 1957. EVERY PRINTING, NOT JUST AN OLD MAP Pick a spot and the timeline shows one tick per printing, in lanes by series: 7.5 minute, 15 minute, 1:100,000 and 1:250,000. Some quadrangles have fifteen printings between 1900 and 1975. Drag across the lane and they run as a flipbook, so the contours hold still while everything people built moves. A PRINTING IS NOT A SURVEY The card tells you which. "Printed 1959 from the 1954 plate, 5 years on. Nothing here was checked in the field after 1954." That is the difference between a trail that existed in 1959 and one that existed in 1954 and was still being reprinted for another decade. WALK IT Follow mode, heading up, your position in degrees and minutes, and track recording that keeps going with the screen off so a long day comes back as one continuous line. Export it as GPX. OFFLINE MAPS, PLURAL Save as many as you like. Each one keeps the printing you are looking at over the ground on screen, several zoom levels deep, and appears in a list with its size and its own delete button. The backcountry has no signal, which is rather the point. IS IT STILL THERE Tap the eye and the old paper lifts away to the modern map or satellite imagery, so you can see whether a route someone drew in 1911 is still a line in the trees. Tap it again and the sheet comes back. Sheets come from the USGS Historical Topographic Map Collection. Reference layers are Apple Maps and the USGS National Map. Coverage is the United States.

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    Information

    Seller
    • Ryan Sajdak
    Size
    • 889.9 KB
    Category
    • Navigation
    Compatibility
    Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
    • iPhone
      Requires iOS 17.0 or later.
    • Mac
      Requires macOS 14.0 or later and a Mac with Apple M1 chip or later.
    • Apple Vision
      Requires visionOS 1.0 or later.
    Location
    • This app may use your location even when it isn’t open, which can decrease device battery life.
    Languages
    • English
    Age Rating
    4+
    Copyright
    • © 2026 Ryan Sajdak
  • Developer Website
  • Privacy Policy