California Atlas & Gazetteer

Good detail and assistance especially for camping and recreational activities. Would have liked one page maps of the inner major cities such as LA and SF but otherwise very pleased with purchase. Very timely delivery to other side of world.

This book is awesome! It contains sufficiently detailed maps for trip planning purposes. It covers the entire state of California so it is larger than most of the others in the series. However, this series of maps is so handy to take along and will save you lots of time! We have found that despite the wonders of Google Earth, Google Maps and other map services, sometimes just a plain old hard copy map works well! You will also not need Wi-Fi, and if your computer or tablet goes down you will still have the atlas!! It is simply a very handy supplement to trip planning!

At first blush this Atlas looks authoritative and promising but it does not bear looking at closely. It is riddled with mistakes. I am an ex-cartographer with many years of experience in the field. I am also a map collector. And I also prefer maps to GPS devices. I find them to be much more fun. But there is no fun in this atlas. I have lived in California all my life and know Southern California like the back of my hand. Though I am not sure what primary sources were used in the making of this atlas, I strongly suspect that Delorme got into trouble using outdated USGS maps.

They also made some very bad decisions in their cartography. For example, they show, in the many urban areas of the map, a myriad of lines spider-webbing all over the place. These are unnamed roads which do the user absolutely no good whatsoever without the names. They clog up the map terribly and Delorme should have forgone this vanity and, instead, shown less roads but named the ones they showed. This is an unforgivable flaw in this atlas. Furthermore, very important information is not shown at all: the full course of a very important road (especially to tourists)--Mulholland Drive--is not shown. A very popular tourist destination and Los Angeles County Park, Devil's Punchbowl, is omitted entirely. Utterly useless place names that haven't been in use in two generations pop up on this map in great abundance adding to the systematic disinformation this shabby product provides. The mistakes are legion--too many to list here. But, to demonstrate their cavalier attitude toward accuracy, I will point out that they have completely omitted an entire intersection on Interstate 15 in the Temecula Valley: Indian Truck Trail.

This Atlas is now in the outhouse where it belongs and where I can peruse it to turn up even more errors. The more one looks at this the worse it gets. If Delorme would do a job this badly on the California Atlas (probably used by more tourists than the atlases of any other state), I shudder to think of what kind of job they've made of the atlases of the other 49 states.

My advice is to either find another large-scale atlas of California, download large-scale hybrid printouts from Google Earth (or a similar site)or use your GPS. Whatever you do, do NOT use this atlas as a guide to the many unpaved roads that cover much of the thinly populated areas of Southern California or you might well find yourself in big trouble. The reason for this is that in just one winter season some of these roads are washed out or riddled with boulders that make them impassable.

I would also like to point out to any tourists to Southern California to be very, very conservative in your decision to go off the paved road, unless you are very experienced and know SoCal well. Death Valley National Park, to just name one area of many, deals with lost, missing and expired tourists regularly who decided to be adventurous and take an upaved route through mountains or desert.

I was recently the navigator on a 10 day California coast road trip. I ordered the Delorme Atlas to serve as a back-up to my Nuvi GPS. The map is certainly is the better way for looking ahead for rest areas. Half way through the trip, the binding cracked and pages began to fall out. Not good when driving in a convertible with the top down! So I stopped at a Kinko's Copy Center and they replaced the binding with a spiral binding. Now it went from a good atlas to a great atlas! I'm certainly going to do this to any other Delorme atlas I use in the future.

How can anybody give this product a 5-star rating?? Being a European I ordered this atlas before I went to California, and it looked great at first sight - the only obvious fault was the binding that did not allow it to be put flat on the table when opened. The only acceptable binding for a road atlas is a spiral spine that allows it to open fully and even be turned "inside out" so you can view one page only. This DeLorme atlas is not user friendly - my wife held it on her knees while I was driving, and the binding made it close itself as soon as she took her hands off the book. Moreover the binding soon proved to be of very poor quality as the pages started to fall out after only 4 days, and that was not due to any abuse from us. As tourists we wanted to use minor roads as well as freeways, and we soon got into trouble. The roads listed as Major Connectors or Major Streets in the legend can be anything from paved 4-lane roads in suburbs to the worst gravel roads only accessible by 4-WDs. One example - the "major connector" leading from Rimrock (page 143 B8) up to State Route 18 near Big Bear City should not be attempted by anything else than a high clearance 4wd with an experienced driver at the wheel. How can DeLorme call this dirt track a major connector?? Inaccurate or misleading information was found in many places, for instance a place called Bagdad (page 132 D4). This place is marked as "City or Town" according to the legend, but not a single house was to be seen there. And that was not the only non-existing "town" in that area. Many places of great interest for the tourist were not specially marked, for instance Calico, one of the best preserved ghost towns in California, is only marked as a town and not as a place of interest. On the other hand DeLorme has found it necessary to mark no less than 8 boat ramps around the tiny Big Bear Lake - what is so important with that?? My conclusion is that this DeLorme atlas is fine if you want to find the best way from one city to another, but if you are a tourist and want to explore the deserts of California, you may miss many interesting spots and even get into hazardous situations if you try to go by their "major connectors".

Although this one was purchased as a gift, I have one just like it and am completely satisfied with it (as is the gift recipient). DeLorme has the market cornered on making a product that is both user friendly and detailed enough that one could go hiking with this Atlas and Gazetteer. Two thumbs up!

Although this one was purchased as a gift, I have one just like it and am completely satisfied with it (as is the gift recipient). DeLorme has the market cornered on making a product that is both user friendly and detailed enough that one could go hiking with this Atlas and Gazetteer. Two thumbs up!

Added the California atlas to our other eastern atlases before heading off for two weeks in unknown territory. The atlas has the detail needed to supplement mapquest & GPS. Wish it had a few detailed city maps.

This joins the DeLorme Arizona, Texas, Colorado, and Utah topo's in my collection. All for visiting the places where we lived and played hard. Of course you always wish for more detali, but then you'd need a wheelbarrow to carry the information. It is perfect for what we use it for - scouting, relationships, general topography, road details, etc.

The California Gazetteer always goes with me on a road trip - or if I'm planning one. I'm a new transplant to California, and the maps in the Gazetteer are colorful, easy to read, and as complete as I need. I very rarely can't find where I'm heading on these maps, and they are easy enough for my navigator to keep up where we are and where we need to go on. I am very satisfied.

For just little money (at least as you order this atlas by the store! prices differ very much, especially for the price of the shipment!) you get an amazing accurate atlas and driving map, beautiful printed and a lot of things to see and explore. I am very glad with this map that I will use for driving through California, where I'm going to travel for photography and where I will not visit the familiar and usual places.

DeLorme's state atlas and gazetteer series are generally very useful products, good for navigation on the road and for finding place and things. California represents a particular challenge for the traveler. It's a big state. Parts of it are very densely populated; other parts, not so much. The terrain varies from the beaches and cliffs along the Pacific through the inland valleys to the Sierra Nevada that runs along the eastern boundary of the state. That's a lot of ground for one atlas (it used to come in separate northern and southern California editions), especially when you consider the dense urban areas around San Francisco and Los Angeles.

This DeLorme Atlas has the standard layout: a large scale map of the state for an overall look, an index of placenames, listings of recreation and camping areas, and a series of map sheets depicting the state itself. The scale of the map sheets should be sufficient for navigation on the major road networks. Additional map supplements might be necessary in the urban areas. Just enough terrain detail is provided to give drivers some indication of what to expect in terms of large physical features such as rivers, lakes, and mountains.

The California Atlas and Gazetteer is recommended for those travelers visiting the state and moving around within it. Check for the most recent edition.

We purchased this atlas, publish date 2010, as a resource for little known roads in California. Our prior fold-out maps, while seemingly accurate, had very few smaller roads detailed. Being from California, major highways were not a concern for us. This map book has many roads in it, but unfortunately YOU CANNOT RELY ON THIS BOOK BECAUSE THERE ARE MANY MISTAKES.

While exploring San Luis Obispo and Monterrey counties we found four roads that were deadend, dirt roads listed by this guide as 'Major Connector'!! Locals informed us that one of the roads never did go where the map showed it to, another had been closed for more than a decade, and the other two have been dirt roads over private property since inception! Google maps and US Forest service maps demonstrate the proper road form and distribution. I bought this paper map for when internet service is not available, like when driving back roads, but it is useless for this without first checking a reliable source.

DeLorme has been NEGLIGENT in releasing this map version. They have failed basic accuracy checking and I am wondering where they even obtained this inaccurate information to publish in the first place. For fun, one could spend weeks with accurate maps and many tanks of gas and find the very likely many, many pages of inaccurate data in this worthless book. Good only for recycling or firestarter.

I bought this atlas to replace my Northern California Delorme atlas. This current issue is not nearly as good.

First off, I do not abuse any of my map books. None of my Delorme books have stayed together, be it perf bound or staple. Go have them wire-bound. Secondly, this atlas does not give you the ultra-detail you might think you're getting. The detail level of this book isn't nearly as good as the Nor-Cal edition. I was very displeased that the topographical features of this book were lacking. If you are looking for a detailed map for serious backroading, camping, hunting ect., I'd recommend the Nat Geo Trails Illustrated. This is just not detailed enough. Many roads listed in here do not tell you they are unpaved, which could be a real irritant.

However, I would not say this book isn't useful. It's better than a road atlas, as you will be able to see topo shading for the entire state. All major peaks are listed, as well as mines and many other points of interest. If you're coming to California for the first time, it'll be very useful. If you live here and are looking for a new adventure, you might want to head to REI and go to the map section and find something else.