David DeLorme, a Maine native and brilliant entrepreneur, introduced a product to the world in 1976 that has changed America's outdoors scene perhaps more than anyone else has ever done, including state-icon L.L. Bean himself with his world-famous, mail-order business.

Surely, it would be a gross understatement to say DeLorme made a nuclear-sized, information explosion on anglers, hunters, hikers, wildlife watchers, watercraft owners, auto sightseers and so forth, who travel from coast to coast.

The story began one spring in the 1970s when DeLorme was fishing in the Moosehead region and came to a fork in a private gravel road, confusing him as to which one led to his destination.

No up-to-date road maps existed for Maine's large, private lands, so his problem proved a common one in those days.

DeLorme's dilemma spawned an idea that took root in 1976 on his kitchen table after he had collected county, town and road maps that were in the public domain. He put a large-sized maps book together, named it DeLorme's The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer and drove around the state, selling from his car, a most humble start.

Compared to DeLorme's paper maps today, which include 80-foot contour lines, swamps, etc., the first atlas was crude enough. Sports folks immediately saw its benefits, though, particularly north-woods travelers who ran into the same problem at forks in the road.

The outdoors public immediately saw one benefit of DeLorme's atlas over topographic maps, the latter severely outdated. In the 1970s, woodland owners were building roads practically monthly that didn't show up on topos, some of the maps 20 and 30 years old.

Also, washed-out bridges were missing from topos, too. DeLorme updated The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer often with new roads and destroyed bridges included.

So overnight, Maine's outdoors crowd adopted DeLorme's maps book for current road and bridge info and continued using the U.S. Government issued maps for topography data, the best of both worlds.

When traveling on Maine's extensive, private-road system in northern and eastern Maine, I often put a compass on the seat beside an open atlas. A small gadget helps, too, which looks like a pen but has a wheel instead of a ball point on its end. The wheel rolls along the map roads and records exact mileage, great for navigating unmarked byways. I measure the mileage in my chosen course and check my calculations with waterways, mountains and town lines to make sure of location, a must when negotiating a network of roads to get to fishing or hunting spots.

The modern navigator.

When DeLorme made his first maps book, lots of us thought, "Why didn't I think of that first?"

After all, the county maps were free, but DeLorme was the right man in the right place at the right time and possessed vision and a meticulous genius for cartography.

It took an assiduous leader to take this product to where it has gone under DeLorme's tutelage.

Circa May 1983, I met DeLorme on Alder Stream above Eustis while he was fishing with Harry Vanderweide. During our conversation, DeLorme highlighted a problem with his early maps. They had major mistakes, even after DeLorme Publishing Company started making them from photos taken from the air.

Here's just one problem that an average Joe such as myself could have never foreseen:

If an air photo was taken when no foliage covered trees, poplars growing in an old tote road might not show up, so to map makers, it would look passable for vehicular traffic.

Folks who bought this atlas would show up on that byway and find trees with 12-inch trunks, blocking passage.

By 1986, this mapping company had grown to 75 employees to keep up with DeLorme's ideas and genius, and today, it has grown to over 200 workers, one of the world's foremost paper and software map makers, an institution within three decades.

In the early years of The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer, DeLorme added pertinent information that quickly grew to include lists of state parks, swimming areas, canoe trips, hiking trails, campgroundsÉthat sort of stuff.

DeLorme spread out across the country, too, as this company started making atlases for each state. Whenever I travel, say to New York, Tennessee, Florida or Montana, I buy an atlas for my destination state because it shows all the secondary highways as well as dirt roads.

This maps book really has become a must tool for outdoors types, which reminds me of a quick anecdote. Recently, a friend and I were talking about fishing, and a question popped up.

Which single map in DeLorme's The Maine Atlas and Gazetteer shows the best, quality, salmonid waters?

I quickly said Map 50, which includes the West Branch of the Penobscot below Ripogenus Dam, all the blue-ribbon, brook-trout ponds in southwest Baxter State Park, Rainbow Lake, Frost Pond, Little Frost Pond, Harrington Lake, Nesowadnehunk Lake and many of the great trout waters in the Nahmakanta region. A man or woman could spend a lifetime fishing these waters and never get to them all -- shown on just one map page in the atlas!

Maine salmonid fishing just doesn't get any better than Map 50, or does it?

That's what DeLorme's is good for, wiling away winter evenings, deciding which map has the best of what on it, and the list of entertainment possibilities equals the imagination.

Ken Allen, of Belgrade Lakes, is a writer, editor and photographer. E-mail: kallyn800@aol.com