uh just by way of introduction, I recently retired from the National Park
Service. I worked at the Harpers Ferry Center, which is in harpers Ferry
west Virginia, about 50 miles west of Washington D. C. And this is the
National Center where all media for all national parks is created. So if
you go to a park visitor center and look at the exhibits that those
exhibits are designed to Harpers Ferry center, the movies are produced
there. The publications are produced by the wayside exhibits. And
fortunately for me, lots of maps, it's it's, I've had a career, it's like
working in a candy store, uh working on various national park maps at any
time. I'd be working on a couple of dozen. But apart that really has a
special place in my heart is the Grand Canyon. Um There are four
cartographers that work at Harpers Ferry Center. We divvy up the 417
National Parks among us. And fortunately for me, Grand Canyon landed in my
lap and you know, topographically and historically there's probably no
better park to map. And that's what I'm gonna talk about today. Are some
of the, the maps that I've made of Grand Canyon National Park through the
years. Okay, so if you were to go To the park this morning, drive up to
the entry entrance station, pay you $25 to get in the friendly ranger uh
would give you a brochure. And this would be the map that's on that
brochure. Looking at it, It looks like a pretty standard National Park
Service map. Doesn't You see the entirety of the Grand Canyon from Lake
Powell up in the northeast, down to Lake Mead in the southwest, all 277
river miles of the park. This is what we do with most of our brochures. We
create a park wide map. Uh they've been handing this thing out and the
public by and large has found this map to be completely useless. Okay. You
know, as you probably know, there's about six million people who visit the
park every year. The majority go to the south rim. The majority spend four
hours or less at the park and then leave. I mean such a pity. Okay, so you
know, the park, you know, came to me saying, look, you know, we need
another solution. You know, this map is just not doing the trick. What we
would like to do is create a supplemental map that they're going to call a
pocket guide.
Oh yeah. And the idea was that this would focus on the south rim itself
And be, you know, something small that can fold up into a pocket uh, and
be, you know, 17" wide and cover the entirety of the south room and I said
, yeah, sure. I'll take that on. Um now I want to warn you right off the
bat that the solution that I came up with, if they gave out such things as
cartographic licenses, mine would have been revoked by the map that I
produced. Okay, so you know, I won't say anything more before we look at
the map, let's just do a little photographic reconnaissance of the south
rim. And when you mentioned to most people in the world, Grand Canyon,
this is the image that conjures up their mind. It's a sunset at Yavapai
Point. It's, it's serene, majestic, majestic, beautiful. All these
adjectives that come to mind. Okay. And you're just looking at this
photograph, look at the colors. I'm going to come back to these colors
later in my talk. Now there's another side of the Grand Canyon that most
people don't think about. This is a couple 100 yards away. You know, this
is the, the parking lot at the visitor center. You know, the, the Coconino
Plateau is, it's vast, it's largely flat, its forested. There's not many
landmarks at the south rim. The village area which has grown organically
over the years. There's a tangle of roads Getting around is very difficult.
Finding parking is very difficult. Visitors have to deal with this
situation here before they could get to point. There's uh, you know, also
the Grand Canyon railroad that arrives at the railway station near the rim.
People disgorged from the train there and get out and they have to find
where the can in this in this landscape and of course, you know, most of
us have been here, we know the way. But if you're a first time visitor,
that's difficult. That's where my job comes in, pointing him in the
direction uh, to relieve traffic congestion on the south rim. The park
service now has a very nice shuttle bus service and this is working, you
know, pretty pretty well. And uh, I mean there's a problem with this too
is, you know, people have to acquaint themselves with the bus routes and I
say this, you know, as most americans including myself, are not really
that accustomed to using public transportation. So you know, bang right
off the point that they have to learn about this bus system on on the
south rim. And for the more energetic visitors to the south rim, there's
the greenway system of bike trails that people could rent out bikes and
and ride through the forest. And I will mention that there's also just a
very beautiful rim trail and bikes are not allowed on that trail for very
obvious reasons.
Okay, so enough of the photo reconnaissance, let's let's look at maps. The
The South Rim itself stretches for 32 road miles from Hermit's rest in the
west. Always desert view in the east. So this is this is the area that the
park wanted me to focus on. Okay, and most of the visitors go to this area
that we call Grand Canyon village collectively. And what we see here is a
data dump from open street map. I just got all the data for that area. So
if you're getting an open street map map, this is what you'd be looking at.
There's, there's really lots of stuff there. Look at all the houses,
there's employee housing, there's 2000 permanent residents in Grand Canyon
Village. That's a lot of people. That's a small city, isn't it? And it's
also, you know, high school. So really the first step in mapping this area
for the public is to get rid of the stuff that the public does not need to
see and that that really does does help out, doesn't it? Okay, but we're
not out of the woods yet. On on this. When you, when you look at this
Grand Canyon village area closely, there's three nexus is of tourist
activity. There's, you know, the area that the park service called the
village Market Plaza and then the visitor center area. So if I'm making a
map, look how tightly clustered those buildings are, how in the world
would I label these things in a meaningful way for the public? And of
course, I think all of you would know the answer. We need insects, don't
we? Okay, well, I'm, next slide, I'm going to show you is inset madness to
properly
to properly mapped the entire Grand Canyon at the scale that you want to
get visitors to where they want to go. You would have to make a map of the
entire south rim to show that the broad overview plus have six insects,
including insects of insects, Which of course is not a very good solution.
So this is the quandary that I was looking at to make a map 17" wide of
the South Rim. And you know, I was puzzling about how to do this. And one
of my contacts at the park said tom, don't worry, we have the solution for
you. He said, I just went on vacation. Uh, the place where I went, I had a
wonderful map and what I would like you to do is replicate the map that
this place uses. Okay, now, whenever a client suggests a solution to me,
all kinds of red flags go up and I think you'll see the reason why, uh, he
went to Disney World.
So, um, I had to talk him off the ledge, so to speak and you know, and I,
you know, quietly explained it. Okay. You know, uh, Disney world is, is
fabricated, human made. The Grand Canyon is a, is a natural sort of place.
Disney world is, is very concentrated. The south rim is spread over tens
of miles and there's this, this problem of style. Um, you know, this is
not quite in the National Park Service look that we, we'd like to project
to the public. Although I have to admit looking down the lower right, I'm
really fond of the North arrow that they have, you know,
so um, what I did is I turned to the National Park Service graphical
identity roots. These were developed by an amazing new york city based
graphic designer named Massimo. Finally, you can tell he's a graphic
designer, he's, you know, he's dressed in black and has a very serious
expression. Uh but in 1972 he came up with the unit grid system of, of
brochures for the National park system. Everything was standard. You know
, we could, we could print on standard sized sheets of paper, minimize
waste. We had a common identity with that black title title band. Uh it
was just a phenomenally successful program that finally came up with and
also, you know, he was a big believer in this more or less minimalist,
give the public the information they need to know, leave the stuff out
that they don't need to see. Okay, now, you know, Vignali was a, he was a
designer, you know, he made product packaging, he did interior design, you
know, all made furniture, all manner and stuff like that. He was not a
cartographer, but he did dabble in cartography Once He made the first ever
New York City Transit Map. This was in 1972
And some of you will notice that, you know, this map is in the style
pioneered by Harry Beck for the London underground in 1933, I believe. Um
so finally came out with the first iteration in this modern style of the
new york city transit map. Now, I will say that this map was quickly uh
replaced the public did not take to it very well at all. It's, you know,
highly diaphragmatic water areas are shown with a color that I don't
normally associate with With water. You know, even in the polluted days of
the 1970s.
But one of the things that Vignali did, I think what's very interesting on
this is he, he treated scale elastically to show all of the transit routes
on Manhattan island. You could see that he widened the island to get all
of those in there. And that gave me the big idea. You know, maybe I could
do something like that for the south rim. Okay, hold on to your seats. I
got into adobe illustrator and loaded up a proper plan, a metric base map
of the south rim and then just started messing around. And this is the map
that I eventually came up with. Okay, um, it's essentially a caricature of
of the south rim. I'll admit that right off the bat And let me explain
some of the purposeful distortions that I built into this map. The area
within this yellow oval, uh, that's about 2.5 miles wide. Remember the
entire south room from, you know, desert view to Hermit's rest is 32 miles
, wow, I am really getting pretty radical here and what's what's more uh,
within that large yellow circle. These areas, I further expanded just to
air them out so I could show people what was there and labor already now.
Um, I will explain a few slides from now how I conveyed this purposeful
distortion to the public and you can judge whether it works.
So here's the, here's the map of, of the, the base map of the south room
that I created. Um, the first thing that I did is, you know, you can see
all the building footprints shown in black. Now, if I was to ask you, what
does the footprint of the Memorial Union buildings look like from above?
Does anyone really know? You know, I sure don't, but I kind of know what
it looks like from the outside. So the first thing that I did was to show
all of the buildings in this sort of pseudo three dimensional style, this
cartoonist style and Dory is going to be talking about that. I think
tomorrow is kino will probably see something similar. You know, these
things. Well, they look cute, they draw attention to themselves and people
could recognize them more readily than standard footprints. Now I was, I
was working very closely with my colleagues at, at the park at all stages
of this map design production. I showed them this, this, this base map.
And much to my surprise, a lot of people did not realize that that darker
beige color in the background was the canyon and that lighter green area
in the four grand was the Coconino plateau. You know, you could see some
some bits of cliff on on the left and the right. I thought that would be
enough to keep people in. Uh It wasn't and it's always humbling to get
this kind of feedback from people, it's obvious to me, you know, you know
what things work because I made it, but other people are not seeing it. So
I I added a little bit of topographic texture to the background. And I
think that removed all doubt as to where the Grand Canyon was on on this
map. Okay,
next up I put a black band on it. You know, we're the Park service, we we
love our black identity um bands And one of the things you'll notice on
this map, the colors are very muted, The roads are white and that's
because this map also had to serve as a transit map for the bus system
which are color coded. And I wanted these bright colors to apply to the
bus routes. So I added the bus routes inside the roads. So at this point
the base map was more or less, you know complete. Now I would say this map
now is more or less picture and really to bring you know, meaning to maps
, you need to put labels on the map and I have a couple of labels that I
added to it.
My original idea was that the map would have probably half as many labels
on there, especially on the, on the periphery going out to hermit's rest
uh, desert view. The park staff reviewing this of which there was probably
well over 100 people had different ideas about that. Everyone had their
own agenda. And so you know, over time, over months I would get emails and
I would kind of cringe. It's like tom had this and this and that and so
forth. It was quite the challenge. Um, I tried to build in visual
hierarchies with, with the labels so you can see the most important things
, you know, in the forefront, boulder coming coming out. I also used all
the symbols. I clustered them in areas to give more weight to the areas
where visitors would be going. So they could, you know, focus on those
areas first. Now you're probably thinking, okay, You know, he crafted
himself, you know, a pretty nice map here, but it's completely distorted.
People are gonna get confused by this saying, how do you convey to the
public that this map is not to scale? It's grossly not the scale. The
first thing I did is I put these, these red scale arrows up at the top.
You know, it's kind of says, okay, this is, you know, so many miles from
here to here. The park had this at the visitor center desk. They were
showing this to the public, no one noticed it. Okay. You know, this was a
cartographic fail. Um, it's like, uh, this is the problem. So my my next
solution was to, you know, put an oval there. Okay, just kind of okay
there it is. This, you know, map not to scale, you know, this this area is
enlarge and this was my working version of the map for a couple of months
thing took a long time to to make. And uh I thought this was working out
fairly well and about a week before it was published, I had an epiphany
instead of using just a an oval like that with a drop shadow, I decided to
make that oval into a magnified lens itself kind of a device askew
morphing device to say, okay, this area is being in March. And look I I
also put the red scale bars back into, You know, in in uh studying
cartography. One of the things that's drilled into our head is that
redundancy is evil on a map that you don't do it. Uh throughout my, you
know, 40 year career in cartography, I've learned to cherish redundancy.
People read maps and learn in different ways and if you could come at it
and with different approaches and people get it so much the better. So
here's the map. But wait, there's more let's slide it down. Um of course
this is the national parks if they want to put all kinds of stuff on these
things, you know, whitespace is evil must it must be filled. Let's let's
look at some of the other stuff that's on the map, you know, distance
charts for for walkers, bikers and road distances. So you can refer to
these charts and see how far things are. Um pictograph symbols, these all
these symbols representing all the various services that you'll find at
the national at the National Park. A typical National Park Service map
Probably has four or 5.6 of these symbols on different symbols on it. The
South Rim Pocket Map has the record with 21. It's a it's a contest.
Whoever has the most symbols wins and they win by a long shot on this.
Then there's the the the bus information here. Now, one of the things I
wanna show to you is that if you look at the map above most of the bus
routes run east west, don't they look at the charts? How what's the
orientation on those? Yeah, kind of vertically? North south. Right. So
there's a there's a there's a real geographic disconnect between the two.
I had originally designed the charts so that they were horizontal in
format. But the park overruled me on that on that. And we have these to
deal with right now.
And the North arrow, the typical uh National Park Service, North arrow
just has the label north because east and west is so important. I decided
that I need to label uh those direct cardinal directions as well. And also
, I mean with six million people visiting the park, I don't know if people
necessarily, you know, if they just see north would know which way east or
west was in relationship to north. I know it's, you know, you have to
really account for everything. Okay, The, as I mentioned, uh the map is 17
inches wide. It has eight panels when you fold it in half. Um, the map
itself, the important, the heart of the, of the south road appears in the
, in the top four panels. My wife was a hand model there. This map was A
draft of it I created in the winter of 2015,
The park printed up a small print run of 300,000 copies to test to test it
, doing user testing. Uh, it's very difficult to the National Park Service
, you have to get Office of Management and budget approval. It can take 10
minutes to do. They basically relied on on the bus drivers and the staff
at the visitor center For feedback they were getting from visitors. After
that, that initial print run of 300,000, they came back to me, I made a
few tweaks to the map and then they started printing it with print runs of
3.5 million every year. And and that, you know, that that really gives you
pause. I mean you have to scrutinize every label. You don't want a
misspelled word when you have 3.5 million being printed. So that's the,
the pocket map. It's, it's still in use today, although I hear rumors that
they may be swapping it out for something else, but that's not my concern
anymore. So let's move on to the second map. So having dealt with the six
million visitors who are congregated on the south rim. They wanted a
second map and this, this one showing hiking below the rims for the more
adventurous visitors to the Grand Canyon. Here's a typical view down in
the canyon. This is the south kaibab Trail up near the top. Um, you know,
you know, obviously this is a completely different experience than what
visitors on the rim would have. Um, you know, for one thing, it's, you
know, there's, there's a potential danger. You know, you, you know, you
walk down into the canyon, it's, it's very seductive. It's, it's beautiful.
It's an easy trail going down. But of course the problem is you have to
get back up and the parts of his just just very concerned with that and
people die there and we'll be hearing more about death in the Grand Canyon
tomorrow with ken fields talk in all the morbid details that you want to
hear. So, um, making a hiking map. Um, I thought it was very important to
, you know, show topography, uh, properly um, on it. And I, in this case I
turned to bread and barbara washburn, inseparable couple from the boston
Museum of Science, you're gonna be hearing a lot about this map including
later this morning, Michael fries talk So I won't really get into this at
all. I'll just say this, this is just one of the most amazing mapping
efforts ever done. It was it was it was a family affair with with friends
at first and then other organizations got started and they ended up with,
you know, the heart of the Grand Canyon map. It was a seven year effort.
As you know, Brett watched washburn noted, you know, mapping the Grand
Canyon the inverted topography of the Grand Canyon. The challenge was like
mapping a map, A mountain upside down. It's not your traditional map. Uh
He turned to swisstopo in Switzerland for their their rock depiction
skills to show the various cliff bands. And I really liked this technique
and I wanted to replicate it digitally. I used a technique called texture
shading which was developed by a fellow named Leland Brown. He's a rocket
scientist literally from southern California, big hiker and he discovered
a way to manipulate digital elevation models such as we see here, darker
is lower, lighter is higher in this representation. And what texture
shading does is it detects abrupt changes in elevation on a digital
elevation model and amplifies those differences and with increased
contrast. So if uh you know, another uh person implemented in software
called natural scene designer. And we have some really nice um slider bars
for for doing this. There's advanced mathematics behind all of this. But
if you slide the bottom slider over a little bit, you can see how the
contrast is increased. Okay, you can see the ledge iness of Grand Canyon a
little bit better. And if you slide that that second from the bottom
slider all the way over, look what happens, it's an awful mess. Right,
Okay. You're probably not too impressed by what I'm showing you right now.
Watch what happens now. Here's the here's the central part of the Grand
Canyon. The visitor center would be at the bottom center phantom Ranch,
kind of the targets that called I think many of you recognize this. This
scene. This is shown with shade relief generated from a 10 m DM, the
highest resolution DM. Now, publicly available for the Grand Canyon. It's
a pretty good shade relief. When you say, let's combine that with texture
shape. Okay, so this is uh 60% shade relief, 10 40% texture shading with
normal blending mode in adobe Photoshop. And all of a sudden you start
seeing the levels of the canyon much much better. Now let's add those that
really noisy texture on top of it. And this is also a Photoshop with soft
light blending mode. And you can see the rock textures there. But wait,
it's getting kind of noisy, isn't it? So what I did is I took the DM
created a slope mask from that and eliminated the rock texture from flat
areas and areas of gentle slope and we have something that looks like this.
This is getting pretty, pretty close to, you know what the swiss were
drawing by hand with their their rock text drink. You can see the cliff
bands very well, the talus slopes and you can see the areas that are flat.
Let's go back to the original shade relief back to that product. So, I
think that was an improvement. Now. Uh, you know, this is this map is for
the public, we don't want to leave it grayscale, so it needs to be
colorized and these are the colors that I came up with, you know, I'll
just say that the colors are just one of those intangible aspects of map
design. You know, people glance at a map and you want them to relate to
the colors to be attracted to it instantly. You know, I think of colors as
the pheromones of map designers, just like, it's like dating. You know,
it's like, yeah, the instant, like, er, and you want to get that, I'm not
going to talk much about the colors here except for notice the colorado
River. It's a nice, pretty blue. Yeah. If I had shown the colorado River
with this, you know, natural water color, you would not see it on the map
because it basically blends in with the land. So, so, um,
I had to make allowances here. Here's the labels that I put on the map,
note how the trails are highlighted. Yellow at the visitors center. Is
that the rangers often just get a highlight our out and show you where to
go. I saved them the trouble and just highlighted it myself.
And here here's the hiking back compared to washburn's hardly Grand Canyon.
You know, one of the things you'll notice is that, you know, my map is a
lot lighter and that's because legibility is of paramount importance to
the National Park service. We want people to be able to read the labels.
Uh, some of us like myself are retired getting a little bit older. Our
eyes aren't as you know, sharp as they once were. We want all the labels
to be readable frankly. If I had turned in a map like washburn's, my
bosses would have called me into the private conference room for a
conversation.
But on the other hand, it's, it's gorgeous. Here's the hiking map in its
entirety, you know, so it shows the three main trails into the, into the
canyon in the upper left. You'll notice that there's some distant charts
up there. You know, it's green, yellow and red. We're using the stoplight
colors to kind of warn people that okay, green, this is a place where you
can hike down to pretty safely on on a day hike. Yellow start using
caution red, be really, really careful and only experts should go. Okay.
So two maps down. So map for hikers, a map for visitors up on the rim on
the south rim, there's still the park brochure and we decided we would
redo that from scratch. And I'll tell you about how we handle that If we
went back to 1982,
this is the map that you would receive when you entered the park. And
looking at this, this looks like a classic National Park Service map
doesn't, it's pretty nice. It's got a great scale shaded relief. My
predecessor Bill von Almond airbrushed that. Unfortunately, it's just kind
of printed in a kind of a dingy gray. Look at the colors on the map. Um
They kind of dominate all else. You see the park shape. You see, you know
, surrounding you know, reservations and federal lands and and so forth.
The this the colors that you saw on the map you see on this map don't
really emphasize what visitors see when they go to the Grand Canyon. Think
about that first slide of java by point at at sunset. This has no
relationship to that at all. And that really bothered my next cartographic
hero, a fellow named Hal Shelton. He was a trained fine artist from
southern California through happenstance. He found himself working for the
U. S. Geological Survey as a cartographer and he revolted against the use
of administrative land colors and hips metric tents calling them arbitrary
what he advocated instead is the use of natural colors on on maps such as
you know what he would paint and that painting that we see on the left.
His brother was a geologist and a pilot and pal would often fly around the
western us with him and you know he would look at the colors on the ground.
His brother published geology, illustrated some of you might know that
that wonderful book. Anyway, what hal came up with was a way of natural
color mapping. We see that in the lower right. And what's extraordinary
about this technique Is that he did this in the 1950s and 1960s. This is
before the advent of satellites and satellite derived land cover. So I
mean this was really kind of a huge leap and visualization of what the
earth would look like from above and I wanted to emulate this. So this is
the initial mock up. I did this with Melinda Schmidt the designer harvest
very center. You know this is really rough. You know how we saw the whole
side of the brochure looking and um what I want to focus on right now is
this central section of the canyon and show you how I developed a map with
natural colors similar to hell shelters um style. Right now we see a
grayscale map. It's shade relief and texture shading combined. Been there
done that already. The Grand canyon is largely an arid environment. So the
first step is I just made it kind of beige, made it look a little bit
drier. But you know as most of us know the Grand Canyon is more than Aaron
lands. You know five of the seven life zones in North America are found in
Grand Canyon National Park. Yes. Can you hear me having problems? Is that
better? Okay I'll project thank you. So I I wanted to show um forested
areas. So I added a forest texture to the high plateaus. Getting this
involved going into the shop creating a forest canopy of texture. You know
graphically kind of looks like a bacterium. But when applied to the map it
kind of looks like forest. I hope I initially was using the USGS National
Land Cover Dataset which shows percent forest canopy to apply that texture
to the the plateaus. But look look how ragged that distribution is. You
can see some big fire burns and it's it's kind of messy. So what I did
instead is I used that same distribution. I got a grayscale digital
elevation model and I used this to apply that that that green forest
texture to the high high plateaus. Um And I think it just works more
successfully. I mean these these grayscale DM almost look sensuous and I
just wanted a you know a general indication of where there was more
biomass. You know in the on the plateaus you know you'll notice it with
the DM The higher you go, the lighter it is, that means more green would
have um fall onto the final map. So here's the here's the map with the
forest textures added. Now usually when designing a map, there's there's
one element that's the crux of the design and that's the next one I'm
going to show you.
It's the I wanted the canyon really to pop out. So I got into Photoshop
and just tinted it, you know this, you know, kind of bright glowing color
. I think you have a P point again now and and I make this sound very you
know, casual, you know to put that tint in. I actually had to go in and
spend six hours tracing the rim of the of the canyon. Notice how on on the
tributary Canyons Kanab Creek and Havasu Creek, they kind of fade out.
They're not as strong. So that applied that that color to the canyon. Now
I think this is you know, getting a step in the right direction but it
doesn't look quite as deep as it should. So in the next step I went back
to that digital elevation model and use that to darken the canyon bottom,
okay, etching it right into the colorado Flatow. And I think it added
benefit to this is that you know it shows the the inner gorge better. And
of course, you know in the inner gorge we have the pre Cambrian, you know
vishnu shifts and those, those darker rocks, which is map suggest?
All right, then I added some very subtle highlights and blue shadows to
the highest areas. You will toggle this a couple times. It's subtle, but I
think adding blue shadows to the higher area suggests that you were
getting into the hut, Sony. And uh, you know, you know, climate realm up
on the kaibab Black Child.
And now, um, I had the Colorado River notice that the Colorado River is is
multi colored. Um, you can see sun glints on it. I did this for a couple
of reasons. I I wondered the river to be noticeable and having glimpse
gives it a little more life and and the river courses that, you know, it's
dynamic, it's it's flowing and by showing the sun glints, it suggests that
dynamism, dynamism of the river. Now, one last touch to this map was
adding foreground shadow and background Hayes, if you if you look at
classic landscape paintings by the Hudson River school of painters or
thomas Moran's grand canyon of the Yellowstone, you'll notice that the
foreground is often very dark. The background is kind of hazed out a
little bit and that kind of directs your eye to the center of the painting
, the same thing can be done with a map. And so, you know, with that
foreground shadow in the background. Hayes were now focused almost
exclusively on on the camera itself,
base map is complete. Can you guess what's coming next?
A couple of labels and, and actually there's fewer labels on this map.
This is the first cut at the labels, they were, they're showing up fairly
well. Then I added halos and and drop shadows to make them pop a little
bit more. one thing to notice on this map is what you don't see, you don't
see roads do you? The park boundaries in there, it's very light, it's a
yellow light. This map is intended to show the Grand Canyon in its its
natural splendor without the imprint of humans. Now I do have some
cultural reference points on there. I'm I'm very, I'm very surprised I did.
I made a draft this map a year and a half ago. I thought that the park
would insist on showing roads and all this other stuff. They really held
off. This is the final map in the brochure. This, this incidentally was
printed about three weeks ago. So in the next couple of months when you go
to the park, you'll be receiving this, this map. Um My colleague, Melinda
smith did the layout on this. What's interesting is by and large National
Park staff. They tend to focus a lot on the text and the photographs on
these brochures. The maps, they don't scrutinize nearly as carefully and
it's it's probably good that they do. Um This was a very early draft and
it was a major major problem that was discovered on this after one week.
If you look at the little inset map down at the bottom left, you'll see a
little critter sitting on it. Okay. That is a ring tailed lemur from
Madagascar.
Um Let's fix it. There's a ring tailed cat.
Can you imagine printing 3.5 million copies with a lemur on it? There's a
reason why we take our time and and and and get these things. Right, okay.
Um
Oh and I'll add one more thing. There's aversive to this this map and
includes more interpretive information including a splendid geologic
column which carla Carlstrom contributed to. And we'll be hearing more
about that hopefully later in the conference. So um very quickly and I'll
finish this thing up. How we doing for time. Okay. Um this is a map that I
created in The year 2000. Um it's it's a panoramic map of the of the Grand
Canyon and my inspiration for this was Heinrich Moran. He he's an Austrian
was an Austrian. Now, obviously and in his career he painted over 500 ski
area Panoramas and um panoramas of other places. Ocean bottom maps, you
know, including four panoramas of national parks, you know here we're
looking at Yosemite. He also painted Yellowstone Denali and north cascades.
Uh you know, these are, you know, one m wide posters that he created.
They're they're absolutely lovely and wonderful. Incidentally, we um we
digitally remastered all of his artwork recently. They're up online. I
have a U. R. L. At the end of my talk, go there, download these things.
They're absolutely beautiful there in the public domain. You can print
them out in all their uh colorful um glory. Um Anyway, Baran was a master
of painting panoramas, you can see him, he's wearing his favorite vest,
he's a he was a flamboyant character and his artwork was also flamboyant
and he inspired me to create a panorama of the national um Grand Canyon
National Park. Now I'm not nearly as flamboyant as Baran nor are my maps.
And then this was intended to work as a get around map for the south rim.
Yeah. One of the things, one of the important things that I borrowed from
Baran was how to portray the foreground and the background in the in the
panorama. If you're flying over landscaping an airplane like I was
yesterday afternoon, you're by the window, you look out the window and you
look toward the horizon, you see the horizon line and the sky. Okay?
Everything is in profile. If you turn your eyes down and look down,
everything is plan a metric, it's more map life. That's very hard to get
in a three D oblique view generated by computer software. So uh looking at
this map of the Grand Canyon, you'll notice that the foreground is fairly
map like and in the background you could see the profile of the north rim
fairly well, I achieved this with the software called terrain bender by
Bernhardt Yeni then of Oregon state University now of Monash university
and Melbourne Australia with terrain bender. What you could do is load a
digital elevation model and warping. This is kind of a common theme in a
lot of my mapping is distorting and warping things. Um but with terrain
bender you could add curvature to A. D. M. And when you look at it from
the front it forces the foreground into more of a planet metric view and
the background looks more as if it's in program and this is the final map
that resulted Again this was in the year 2000. You know I thought that
this was kind of a wild solution for the Grand Canyon uh map to my Utter
amazement, they actually used this for 15 years. Uh it really had a really
really had a long range run and this is in a park that likes the swap out
maps very regularly. So I was quite pleased that that it lasted as long as
it did. Well I will I'll conclude right now making a few statements When I
when I began my career in cartography just about 40 years ago, you know I
looked at you know people like Moran and Washburn Vignali Shelton with you
know you know amazement, you know they were the pillar of cartographic
excellence. They were the people I aspired to emulate and thankfully you
know during the course of my career something really wonderful happened.
It was the digital revolution. We have now marvelous you know cartography
and G. I. S. Tools, you know, gobs of fantastic geospatial data available
uh fantastic graphical software at our disposal. And I'll say that you
know, most of us, you know with a little bit of perseverance and these
wonderful tools and these wonderful data can now achieve what these former
masters of the manual era created. And it's it's just a wonderful thing I
think nowadays is is the best time ever to be a cartographer. You know,
given what we can do. You know adobe had this this tagline some years ago.
You know if if you can dream it you can do it. And that's quite literally
the case with cartography nowadays. And I'll say it's more appropriate
than ever when you're mapping a place like Grand Canyon National Park. So
I will end on that note and open the floor to any questions you have. Mm
hmm. Mhm mm hmm.
Does anybody have,
Did I break it? Gosh,
who's up there is the question.
We'll take that Gentleman 1st. That handsome gentleman Peter Corvette
and
peter I'm gonna throw this to you ha
it still works and how it works. Tom I wonder if there's a record of the
National Park Service maps going back to the 1919 forward that you that
somewhere in some collection my my office has him going back to
around World War Two. So we, you know at Harpers Ferry center, we have all
those maps and brochures going back to that time. Um I would say that the
Library of Congress, geography map division would be the place to go to
find everything else.
Probably not.
So it looks to me like in your maps that you pretty much understand this
or whatever, but how aware are cartographers in general with the
colorblind males in the US? Well, you're you're talking to one right now.
Mhm. I'm a sufferer of Torino pia. No, um I've slightly red green color
blindness. So I'm usually if I can see the colors fairly well. Most people
with red, green color blindness can kind of see him. Um What I try to do
is when I'm using reds and greens is to have a value difference uh between
the reds and the greens so you can differentiate them um that way. But
yeah, it is, it is a concern. And unfortunately not all cartographers take
that into account. I can think of some some major map publishers who just
blow it off. You know,
two questions. 1st one is if I showed up at Harper's Perry, could I get
maps of Grand Canyon bryce Zion, what have you from the Park Service there
? Is that possible? And the second question is, who are these people that
get to live in this village in the Grand Canyon. Mm hmm. Yeah.
Yes. If you showed up at Harpers Ferry, we you know, we usually have about
a dozen of each new printing of the maps and brochures available. But it'd
probably be easier if you went to um federal office buildings in any major
city. They there's usually a Department of Interior National Park Service
office there where you can find these maps. So that would be a little bit
easier. What was your second question? Who lives in Harpers Ferry?
Oh. Um you know, I would say it's, you know, National Park Service staff
and a lot of contractors and concession owners as well. And independence.
Yeah.
Hi. Uh that's loud. Um I was wondering about what you said about the
elasticity of scale, like how you manipulated that. And then also the fact
that you changed like the river blue like um because that attracts people
more and if like you had it as its natural color will blend in. I was
wondering if you thought that there was a trade off between like keeping
things to their like natural skills and natural colors and attracting,
like people like, like having people understand that map better. Do you
think there's like there's like a cost to having things like more
attractive at the cost of like maybe the truth of what they actually look
like. Mhm. Yeah, that's a that's a really good question. And it's
something that I've pondered a lot throughout my career. My natural
inclination is to you to make create maps with colors that are as true to
nature as possible so that someone in a park holding a map in your hands
can make a connection between that map that they're holding and what they
see in in the landscape around him. But sometimes you have to um alter
that philosophy, a little bit of a classic example of altering it would be
the the greens that you would use in a place like the Grand Canyon to
represent forest. If you if you're up in an airplane or if you're looking
at satellite data of the green forest, you look behind me, it's really
really dark and um you know, dark green is a visually recessive color but
it's at the top of the plateau is the highest areas you look in the canyon
, it's reddish, right, red pops up. So what you have is a graphical
inversion of the landscape going on. Um So this this is a problem
throughout the interior West. So my solution in that case would be to use
much lighter greens than what you would observe on the ground to represent
forest and darker reds, you know, in the canyon and in the more desert
lowland areas to make it work graphically as a map. And there is this, you
know this this you know sort of tug tug of war between geographic reality
and graphic reality that the cartographer has to remedy.
I guess that's me. I I was intrigued by your your last statement about how
today is the best time to be a cartographer with with the tools that are
available over the course of your career. You saw this change happen. But
you also must have retrained yourself for the park system must have
retrained. You can can you talk for a minute about what that transition
was like and and and and what the what the office was like at the time
when the computers were coming and the masking tape and the markers were
going away. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I I obviously had my my my background in the
in the late part of the manual era and I have to confess that I was kind
of a late comer to digital cartography. You know, not until the early
nineties that I see the the whole field of digital cartography and G. I. S.
Turning a corner where the tools and the data to create maps that started
to rival what could be created manually. So I I kind of went into it, you
know kicking and screaming a little bit but I'm so glad I did because it's
just unleashed a whole new world of possibilities graphically and
choreographically. Yeah. I mean at at harpers Ferry Center initially the
maps were not even made in house, they were contracted out. Which is often
the case with the government uh R. R. Donnelley uh cartographic systems in
lancaster pennsylvania did the initial maps. Eventually the park service
built up and in house staff and took over production photo mechanically in
house. And then, you know with the arrival of of computers and digital
data. We uh we started doing everything in the house and much quicker and
better and more beautiful I would say. Yeah, it's been it's been a
fantastic ride. I feel very privileged to have you have seen this major
technological revolution occur you know, during the span of my my career
and you know, just starting off in the manual era, you know a shaded
relief. Uh what I could now create, you know in in an hour might take me a
month back in the old days. People sometimes ask me, you know, do I miss
you know, doing manual shaded relief. And the answer is no. It
was a it was a means to an end you know. Yeah.
For the last one. I just wondered when you made your first trip to the
Grand Canyon?
Did you come when a visitor? Yeah. I I came out there as a visitor and I
spent less than four hours there.
Yeah. But obviously I kept on coming back. Thank you verymuch