How to make maps for hiking

Jul 2, 2015 • in: hiking, DIY • tags: hiking, maps, DIY, selfmade, water-resistant

If you ever go hiking, you might want to take some maps with you. As we are preparing for a hike in Sweden, we found that we need more than one map and each is about 16€. This is too much for us and good quality maps are available online. Unfortunately these are digital and we can not take them with us. Printing them is possible, but they might get wet and will then be unusable.

So we did the following:

  1. Print the map. Do not print on both sides of the paper.
  2. Take a white candle, a tea candle works well. Rub the paper with the candle until there is a good amount of wax on every spot of it.
  3. Put the paper in the oven at about 70° to 80° Celcius. Wait for a while.

You should now have a paper that is fully soaked in wax and that repels water. The map on the paper should also still be fully readable. While it does repel water very well, you should still dry it when it gets wet. A short experiment showed that the paper will still soak with water if you pack it when it's wet.