I put together a routable bicycling map for the upper midwest part of the US. Specifically, the region between 88° and 99° West Longitude and 38° and 47° North Latitude is included in the map. In addition to cycle routes, the map displays elevation contour lines at 400 ft, 100 ft, and 25 ft intervals at appropriate resolutions. The display of each set of contour lines is independently switchable. The map is available for download here (MD5: 24c13586440ec0f5576aa4bdd9dbd881). The map includes the entire state of Iowa, as well as significant portions of North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota - including the cities of Chicago, Madison, Des Moines, Kansas City, St. Louis, and of course the Iowa City/Coralville area. It should also work very well for RAGBRAI.

The map is intended for use with a Garmin GPS. I have the Edge 705 model and it works well on this one. It will presumably work with other Garmin GPS's that use the .img vector maps. If you have success (or failure), please let me know. I will annotate this article with that information. Installation is straightforward - copy the file to the Garmin subdirectory on the SD flash card in your GPS and rename it gmapsupp.img (be careful not to delete any other files that you may want to have available!!). Then reboot your GPS and the four maps should show up in the map listing. OSM_UpperMidWest is the route map, and SRTM400, SRTM100, and SRTM25 are the contour maps with contour intervals of 400 ft, 100 ft, and 25 ft respectively. These may be independently selected for display depending on your preferences. If your GPS supports autorouting, this functionality should work with the OSM_UpperMidWest map - the routing avoids busy highways that you don't want to ride your bike on! The elevation contours will also overlay the commercial Garmin MapSource maps if you want to use them that way.

I've had a few requests for a version of the Upper MidWest bicycling map that can be installed through MapSource. You can download an executable that will do that here (MD5: 15e2b7f873a934b109be9eb7be661140). When you run the executable, it will extract all map data to the folder c:\osm. It will then update the system registry so that MapSource can find the map data. You may need to give the program administrative permission to make this update. After the installation, start MapSource and you will find the new maps in the pulldown menu in the upper left-hand corner of MapSource. For each of the four maps (OSM_UpperMidWest, SRTM25, SRTM100, and SRTM400), select all available maps in the preview window, and then add any other maps (e.g. Garmin maps) you wish to download. Note that you will need to zoom in a few times to see the contours in the preview window, as there are too many contours to show at the smaller zoom settings. Click the download button in MapSource and all maps will be written to your Garmin GPS. Should you wish to uninstall the new maps, close MapSource and then execute the uninstall.reg file in the c:\osm folder. This will remove the registry entries for the new maps. You can then delete the c:\osm folder and MapSource will be returned to its previous state.

After I put together the MapSource version, I figured I'd hit the major OS triumvirate. You can find a version of the map that works with Garmin RoadTrip and MAC OSX here. This will extract into a directory tree that can be used with RoadTrip and MapManager.

The map is based on two sources of data. NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) data is used to generate the contour lines, and Open Street Maps (OSM) data is used for the route portion of the map. Please see the licensing attributions below. Use of the map is subject to these licenses, but is free for personal, non-commercial use.

Map data © OpenStreetMap and contributors, CC-BY-SA.
SRTM contour data provided courtesy of NASA.

You don't need to know this to use the map, but if you are interested, details for putting the map together are as follows:

Software:
mkgmap - a program for rendering OSM map data into Garmin .img format
srtm2osm - a program for rendering the SRTM data set to OSM format.

Map styling:
The contour map styles used with mkgmap were developed by me based on work by Ralf Kleineisel. The CycleMap style, together with the cyclemap.TYP file (modified to include a Family ID) from OSM were used for the route map.