Description

Gem Trek Publishing is the only company that specializes in producing detailed maps of the Canadian Rockies. Map-making and administration are done out of our Victoria, B.C., office. We moved the company to Victoria in 2005, after spending 11 years working out of Cochrane, Alberta, in the foothills of the Rockies.

Gem Trek got into map publishing almost by accident. In 1989, they opened Map Town, a retail map and travel book store, in downtown Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Soon the company was deluged by requests for up-to-date hiking maps of Kananaskis Country, a popular recreational area for Calgarians on the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rockies. So, in 1992, Gem Trek responded with two manually-drafted 1:50 000-scale topographic maps - the Spray Lakes and Kananaskis Lakes maps, both of which are now collectors' items.

From there, the company expanded their coverage of trail maps of the Canadian Rockies to include Lake Louise, Banff, Jasper, Yoho, Kootenay and Waterton Lakes National Park.

A few years into making the maps, Gem Trek started to add trail descriptions and photos to the backs of the maps in order to guide hikers to what they thought were the some of the best hikes on the maps, so that those unfamiliar with the area would have a place to start exploring the trails.

Concurrently with their recreational maps, they developed four touring, or driving, maps that roughly cover southern Alberta and B.C., and extend west to Vancouver Island, B.C., south to Northern Washington, USA, and north to Edmonton, Alberta.