I’ll be the first to admit I’m a bit of a computer geek. And a gadget freak. And a natural-born quantifier: I like to know how far, how fast, how high I have run, biked, hiked or climbed.

So when I stumbled upon National Geographic’s TOPO! software, I had to give it a try.

TOPO! is outdoor recreation mapping software.

Basically, it’s a collection of high-quality digital United States Geological Survey maps lurking beneath a browser that allows the user to plot, measure and print routes.

You can, for example, plot a course from your campground to a nearby summit, measure distance and elevation gain/loss, then print your map. You’ll know how far to go, how high to climb or descend and never get lost.

Applications, it seems, are pretty much unlimited, with uses for hikers, campers, cyclists, boaters – you name it.

The TOPO! series is broken down by state, so I went online (http://maps.nationalgeographic.com/topo/), plunked down $99.95 and, three days later, received my copy of the Kansas/Nebraska TOPO! package. It consisted of eight CDs: an installer disk and seven data disks, formatted for Windows 95, 98, 2000, ME, NT and XT and Macintosh 10.2 or higher.

National Geographic has developed a topographic map series, TOPO!, that should have applications for cyclists, hikers, boaters and campers.

Installation was a breeze, and before long I was looking at a topographical map of the Central U.S. As I zoomed into Lawrence, I was prompted to insert the proper data disk and was greeted by an overhead view of our fair city.

Not bothering with the tutorial, I began drawing a route that followed a 50-mile bike ride I recently had taken. Route-making was easy enough, but about halfway through, the program crashed. Uh-oh.

I relaunched and decided to start on a smaller scale and drew a two-mile walk around the neighborhood. No crash this time, and I learned my family’s nightly walk gained a whopping 61 feet.

OK, so that’s not so impressive, but the TOPO! software was. An elevation profile shows the peaks and valleys of your route; clicking on the profile shows where on the route those peaks and valleys are. Dragging the crosshairs across the elevation profile and watching your progress along your route provides plenty of I-knew-that-was-a-steep-hill moments.

Cool.

There’s also a fly-thru mode, where the program follows your route start to finish – in three dimensions. Think of it like this: Your map has bumps for hills, dips for valleys. In fly-thru mode, you’re an ant crawling over the bumps and dips, but you also can control tilt and elevation of the fly-thru.

Too cool.

The program handled the neighborhood walkabout well enough, so I plotted out one of my bike-commute routes to work. I was surprised to see the map of downtown Lawrence had the News Center, where I work, labeled as a post office. It hasn’t been a post office since 1965, but, I figured, most topographic information doesn’t change, so it didn’t really matter how dated the maps were.

And TOPO! is not a street-level address finder, so I was willing to overlook the outdated labels in the city (and there were many).

My commute route confirmed why it seems harder riding home than riding to work – the ride to work is a couple of hundred feet downhill.

That worked well enough that I decided to give the bigger bike ride a try again.

I made it through the 50-mile route mapping with no problems the second time around. Fly-thru mode showed all the bumps and dips I had experienced. The elevation profile showed I had gained a grand total of 1,500-some feet over the course of 50 miles. I guess Kansas is flat after all.

On a whim, I relaunched the program and had it recalculate the elevation profile. This time it was 450 feet. What? Third time it was 912 feet. Then 1,800 feet. Uh-oh part two.

I launched a fly-thru and saw the program had a hard time showing the two-dimensional route I had drawn. It took the correct path, but the 2D view was not rendered correctly; it most places, it wasn’t rendered at all. Another uh-oh.

Bottom line, I guess, is this is a program with some nice, informative, useful and geeky features that is brought down by its overall bugginess. Hopefully an update is in the works – I used it on my iMac but couldn’t test it for bugs on a PC – because it really is a great idea.

I don’t know how many hours I spent “flying” around Lawrence and the surrounding county, looking for the biggest hills or fastest dropoffs. I took virtual tours of Clinton and Perry lakes and found features to look for on my next trips out there.

If I were, say, taking a hiking trip to Colorado, I could envision buying that state’s version of TOPO! and plotting every hike I wanted to take. I wouldn’t have to hunt for campgrounds and could plan my days to make the most of my trip.

And I didn’t even touch on what arguably is the program’s greatest strength: GPS compatibility.

Users can traverse a route with a compatible GPS, then download the GPS information into TOPO! The route then is overlaid on the appropriate map, waypoints and all.

It works in reverse, too. Plot a course, set your waypoints, then upload the information to your GPS to follow on your next hike.

I haven’t yet pulled the trigger on a GPS, though, so I couldn’t test it out in TOPO!

Hopefully the GPS functions aren’t as buggy as the rest of the program, because the bugs are the only things marring what could be the coolest thing this computer geek, gadget freak, natural-born quantifier has seen in quite a while.