About Lifetime Topo

A detailed, interactive topographic map of New Zealand — built for trampers, hunters, trail runners, kayakers, and anyone else who spends time in the backcountry and wants the best possible map in their pocket.

The map uses the latest open data from Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ), combined with hydrographic chart data from LINZ's marine division, rendered into a modern vector tileset. Everything you'd expect from a LINZ Topo 50 paper map is here: contour lines at 20 m intervals with labelled 100 m majors, named peaks and heights, huts and campsites, tracks, roads, rivers, lakes, vegetation, cliffs, rocky outcrops, and coastal features. For coastal regions like Stewart Island / Rakiura, we also include bathymetry — depth contours, soundings, and underwater features from LINZ Hydrographic Services.

What makes it different

Designed for real navigation. The NZTM 2000 metric grid is drawn over the map at every relevant scale, matching the convention used on every paper NZ Topo 50 sheet. Align the map to grid north, true north, or magnetic north with one tap. Scale bar, coordinates, and elevation readout are always visible.
Live elevation at the crosshair. Pan the map and the height above sea level at the centre is shown in real time, interpolated from contour lines and named summit points.
Terrain type at the crosshair. The map tells you what kind of ground you're looking at — native bush, scrub, scree, wetland, open land, or sea — so you can plan a route before committing.
Full named-feature search. Find any hut, peak, track, river, lake, campsite, or coastal feature by name. Abbreviations work — type “mt an” to find Mount Anglem, or “rakiura trk” to find the Rakiura Track. Māori names with macrons are searchable without typing the macrons.
Share any location with a URL. Pan to a spot, copy the URL from the address bar, send it to a friend — they'll open the map at exactly the same view. Try lifetimetopo.com/-47.07,167.80,13.
GPX drag-and-drop. Drop any GPX file onto the map to see the track overlaid in full topographic context.

Coverage

Stewart Island / Rakiura is fully covered and free to use. This includes the main island, all offshore islands, and bathymetry across Foveaux Strait. Paterson Inlet, Port Pegasus, the Rakiura Track, every DOC hut, thousands of named peaks and coastal features — all on the map, in the browser, no install.

The South Island and North Island are on the way as purchasable region packs. An offline mode is in development for use in the backcountry without cell coverage.

Data sources and licence

Terrestrial topographic data, elevation (the LINZ 8 m DEM used for our live elevation readout and slope shading), and place names are sourced from Land Information New Zealand (LINZ) under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). Bathymetry is from LINZ Hydrographic Services, also under CC BY 4.0. Bathymetric data is intended for planning reference only — not for marine navigation.

The live elevation readout samples the 8 m DEM at the crosshair, which averages over each 8 m cell. On narrow or steep features — sharp summits, knife-edge ridges, cliff tops — the reading can be several metres below the trig-point height shown on the paper topo map. Good for orientation, not a substitute for a surveyed value.

Who we are

Lifetime Topo is built by Jack Wicks in New Zealand. Feedback, bug reports, and feature requests are welcome.

Data attribution

New Zealand topographic data

Sourced from Toitū Te Whenua Land Information New Zealand (LINZ).
Used under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

CC BY 4.0

Hillshade elevation data

Terrain tiles sourced from Mapzen/Amazon terrain tiles, available under the CC0 Public Domain licence.

CC0

Contact

Questions, feedback or data corrections? Reach out via Instagram or Twitter/X. For data corrections on NZ topo data, you can also contact LINZ directly at topography@linz.govt.nz.