Yosemite Valley 3D Printable Relief Map: El Capitan to Half Dome (11 km, 150 mm)

Most mountains are interesting because they're tall. Yosemite is interesting because of the hole. The valley floor sits at about 1,200 m, and the granite goes straight up from it: El Capitan's face is roughly 900 m of rock, and Half Dome tops out at 2,694 m at the east end.

This is an 11 km square that takes in both. El Capitan is near the west edge and Half Dome near the east, with Yosemite Falls, Glacier Point and the whole valley between them. At 150 mm across the scale is 1:73,333, and it's printed at 1x with no exaggeration. The walls are steep enough that the valley reads as a trench you could drop a coin into.

What's on it

• Terrain from the valley floor (1,199 m) to the rim (2,679 m in the data)

• The Merced River and its side streams cut into the surface, so in a second colour the river fills a channel instead of sitting on top like a plastic worm

• Mirror Lake and the other lakes, inlaid the same way

• Contour lines raised 0.6 mm, one every 200 m. On the valley walls they stack up into tight bands, which is exactly how a paper topo map shows a cliff.

Files

• yosemite-valley-150mm.stl: everything merged, single colour, any printer

• yosemite-valley-150mm.3mf: terrain, river, lakes and contour lines as separate parts with colours assigned. Ready for Bambu Studio, OrcaSlicer and PrusaSlicer.

Print settings that worked

• 0.12–0.16 mm layers. The valley floor is nearly flat, and finer layers keep the river channel crisp.

• No supports, 2–3 walls, 10–15 % infill

• A pale grey or granite PLA for the terrain and a mid blue for the water looks right. On a single nozzle, swap filament at about 4.7 mm: everything below 1,250 m (the valley floor and the river) prints in the first colour, and the granite walls in the second.

• Slow the top surface down to around 40 mm/s. The top skin is nearly all of what you see.

Make your own

I made this with MapsTo3D, a free browser tool I built: no account, no install, nothing uploaded. Want Tuolumne Meadows instead, the whole park split into tiles for your bed, or the trail you actually hiked raised off the surface from your GPX file? Frame it and export. It takes about a minute.

Data and credit

Elevation: AWS Terrain Tiles (Mapzen), USGS data in the United States. River and lakes: © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.