Uh Well, as you said, I am the collection manager and Senior Math Library
International. Sorry, this is gonna be a little bit awkward for me because
I have, I have a lot of notes in the computer and all right, um I am the
collection manager and senior map librarian at National Geographic. And
I'm here to tell you about a map. Heart of the Grand Canyon, a version of
which is on display on the back wall there. We National Geographic
published this map in 1928. But the idea for it came from Brad Washburn.
He was
the project director for it and he managed the process, the entire process
from beginning to end and it's commonly said, um seven years, it's really
closer to eight when you think about when he first started buying aerial
photos for it, but he managed to process beginning to end. And he's really
the guy that you should think about when you think about this map. Um
Before I start, I wanna give you a, a quick warning. Um
When National Geographic First agreed to help fund Washburn do this
project, Washburn wrote a letter to the society's President and said, hey
, I think you should consider doing an article in the magazine about this.
And the president at the time then forwarded that note on to the, uh the
magazine editor G grosvenor. And he said in effect, we both know that
Washburn has a lot of crazy ideas about what should go in the magazine.
But this is actually an idea that might work. If you agree, please
consider it. And Groser took the idea to the Planning Council for the
magazine who considered it and wrote back to say, quote, none of us felt
that an article on the making of a map, even of the Grand Canyon would
interest more than a handful of members. So uh as much as I appreciate
your comments this morning, we have about people being rock stars. It, it
was or was the considered opinion of National Geographic magazine, one of
the most beloved and trusted resources and publications in the world that
most of you uh in 30 minutes will look at yourselves and think that you
had just better had gone to lunch.
Mhm.
All right. A little bit about National Geographic.
We were originally founded in 1988 as an organization devoted to the
increase and diffusion of geographic information. Our founders, 33 of them
, a distinguished group of geographers, military men, scientists and
explorers, including a couple of army officers who had played outsized
roles in the exploration of the canyon and I should point out here too
that the earlier version of the slide also had Grove Carl Gilbert labeled
as well as um Henry Gannett. So there was a pretty big contingent of us
guys, us military map makers who were godfathers of us cartography
in pursuit of our mission at National Geographic. We've awarded more than
13,000 grants to thousands of people, oceanographers, archaeologists, poor
explorers, paleoanthropologists
and mountain climbers among many others. People like Robert Pry, Jacques
Cousteau and Jane Goodall. People who you might know from National
Geographic magazine or from perhaps a TV special starting in the 1960 s.
We may be best known for pictures, but cartography is an essential part of
our history too. We published maps in the very first issue of National
Geographic even before pictures made it in. And we have now created more
than 7000 unique maps for the magazine, including 500 pull out supplements.
Brad Washburn's long relationship with National Geographic began in 1930
with a lecture he gave about mountain climbing in the Alps. He was 19
years old at the time and he'd already climbed Mount Blanc and the
Matterhorn as well as the subject of that night's lecture, a summit called
the Green Needle in College Washburn funded his climbing expeditions with
money he was earning on the lecture circuit
in 1934 newly graduated from Harvard. Harvard led the first expedition to
successfully climb Southeast Alaska's Mount Crillon. The next year. The
geographic center team led by Washburn to study photograph and map a 5000
square mile expanse of territory along the Alaska Yukon border. Washburn
later conducted the first photographic flights of Mount mckinley. These
expeditions were documented by articles in National Geographic magazine,
each of which was photographed and written by Washburn himself. Over the
years, Wash grew accustomed to working in extreme conditions. He once
described the difficulty of standing atop M mckinley's South summit at
more than 20,000 ft above sea level
and in temperatures at 20 below zero and trying to set up and operate
survey equipment.
Quote, it is well nigh impossible to operate a delicate theodolite with
gloves on because bare metal cannot be safely touched with gloved hands.
In subzero weather, we cover the tangent screws, leveling screws and other
adjustable parts with adhesive tape. I worked with my left hand in a big
mitten in my right, completely bare. After three or four minutes, I would
put my bare hand under my armpit to warm it up while the recorder checked
his figures. And then I'd go to work again.
Washburn's survey and photo work culminated in the first map of Mount
mckinley published in 1960. He later directed a project funded by the
geographic to make a large scale map of the region around Mount Kennedy.
Canada's Mount Washburn had actually discovered Mount Kennedy 30 years
earlier on his Yukon expedition
and he relied heavily on aerial photography and newly obtained survey data
to make the map.
Not long after Washburn had completed his map on the mount. His work on
the Mat Kennedy map, he and his wife Barbara came to, came to uh the Grand
Canyon and they were as he put it disturbed by the fact that they could
find no large scale maps of the area. The best available were updated
editions of the map you just heard about from Dr Upchurch
Washburn's response, typical was to make one himself a large scale map
depicting the maps depicting the heart of the Grand Canyon stretching from
about the south rim to a point 3.5 miles above the above the Colorado
River
at a scale of 1 to 4800 far greater than any previous map. It would cover
84 square miles and comprise several sheets that Washburn hoped would
eventually be published on a smaller scale as a single sheet to pay for it.
He would use his research fund from the Boston Museum of Science where he
had been the director since 1939 and he would spread the labor and
expenses out. Over a number of years, Washburn was excited to try mapping
the Grand Canyon. It not only represents extremely detailed exploration of
some of the wildest topography on earth, but it also involves some
interesting research to determine the best techniques to depict the canon
in such a way that the end result will be totally accurate and precise
from the scientific, excuse me, from the standpoint of the scientific user
, yet beautiful, interesting and useful for the layman. And the hiker
Washburn's first step naturally was to acquire black and white aerial
photos of the canyon. Beginning in 1970 he arranged to have flights taken
from 54,000
and finally from 8500 ft an altitude low enough to capture important
details such as roads, buildings, mule trails, footpaths and vegetation,
it didn't take long. However, for Washburn to realize that his, his
relatively meager research fund from the Washington Museum of Science was
not going to support his vision. In October 1971 he submitted an
application to the Geographics Committee on Research and Exploration, the
cr to ask for financial support. He wrote,
although I cannot recollect that the National Geographic has ever been
involved in this sort of joint undertaking before I thought I would
suggest it to you partly because it is the sort of thing that you would
probably like, partly because the geographic has the resources and the
inclination to do this thing well and partly because you have a
magnificent organization for distributing a map like this. After it has
been published,
Washburn was optimistic that if the map were properly done, it could be an
exciting addition to world cartography and represent one of the world's
most magnificent cartographic challenges.
By this time, Washburn was well known around the geographic for what he
could bring to a project. Although it was hard to see how he might be
turned down. The CRE nevertheless, nevertheless requested outside opinions
on his application to assess the scientific importance and the viability
of it.
Our chief carto, our chief cartographer at the time, William Peel was
among those who offered his support. He wrote it is astonishing but true
that what is perhaps our most spectacular natural feature has never been
mapped in the way it deserves. Washburn's project appears to be the answer
to this need. Such a map would not only carry great public appeal but also
serve a variety of scientific needs. I therefore recommend that the
committee approve the application
and they did giving him $30,000 in the first of several grants that would
be used for this project.
And here's where I apologize to the people who have RGB or I'm sorry, red
green color blindness. I'm sitting on the plane last night reviewing this
and I just suddenly the red and the green jumped out at me and I went
sorry. There's three maps like this that have red spots on a green
background to achieve the kind of accuracy he sought Washburn first had to
establish adequate ground control. In other words, he had to determine the
precise position and elevation of every part of the canyon that was going
to appear on the map without this framework, the canyon as map would be
neither precisely fixed to the earth's surface nor accurately sized and
shaped. There were existing survey marks in and around the canyon, but
Washburn felt that most of them were inadequate, too old, too far away,
too hard to get to. There were however, a few that he thought were
acceptable, seen here on the map. And these became the basis for his own
new control network.
In early 1971 Washburn, Barbara and a team of friends and volunteers began
to establish survey stations and measure the canyon erecting. A station
was a small engineering project in and of itself, Washburn first drilled a
hole in the rock, then fix a survey target equipment was set up leveled
and calibrated. A white cloth was laid down to make the station visible in
low altitude photography and a plastic sphere which in another life had
been the in of a national geographic globe would have spray painted bright
orange in order to make it visible
from each station. Washburn. And his team used a theodolite to measure
horizontal and vertical angles and lasers to measure distances. The data
they collected allowed Washburn to calculate each station's precise
coordinates as well as its elevation and distance from other stations.
Each station was cited repeatedly perhaps a dozen or more times and excuse
me, multiple locations in order to reduce air and ensure accuracy. And I
don't know how well you can see it if the resolution is very good. But the
sheet on the right is a data sheet that they collected or filled out while
surveying. I think it's from Hopi measuring distances from Hopi Hopi point
to the survey station called middle and about halfway down the sheet. A
little more than half way down the sheet. You see that he has measure the
distance seven times to a 1000 to 1/1000 of a place and then take the
average
washburn. And his team ultimately surveyed from 92 stations located in the
heart of the canyon. The stations are potted on this map and listed in
tabular form on the right accompanied by their elevations and coordinates.
Many of these stations were impractical or impossible to reach by foot.
So most of the transportation was done by helicopter
washburn. And his team also walked the canyon's major trails. Bright Angel
North and South Kaibab Clear Creek, Hermit Tono in order to pop their
locations and record their precise lengths. Even in a low altitude
photography, long segments of these trails were invisible because they
were obscured by shadows and trees tucked under a rock face which you may
have noticed on Tom's presentation. There was a picture of a person what
hiking down a hill, hiking down the trail and he was com completely
underneath a rock face
or they were just too faint due to bear train or low use. Washburn, farmed
out
some of the field, checking to friends and volunteers, but he and Barber
did plenty on their own. In a letter to Cr Chairman Leonard Carmichael
Washburn once wrote, working with a measuring wheel over miles and miles
of rocket terrain can involve mistakes, particularly when you're hot and
tired. So everything of the sort that we have completed has been done at
least twice in the Bright Angel Trail we've now covered 3.5 times.
It's reasonable at this point to infer that Washburn was fairly detailed,
obsessed, but he was neither unpleasant nor impractical. He once told a
volunteer who was field checking a trail with a surveyor's wheel. If you
make a bad mistake, never back up as the wheel won't reverse, just stop
and cuss a bit or a reasonable amount, then go back to where you made your
last reliable measurement, start to wheel zero and just start over.
Sorry, I meant to point out this is also a sheet he used while, while, um
, measuring Bright Angel. And you can see, I, I hope you can see that what
he does is he sets the wheel of zero, starts walking a couple of 100 yards
, maybe to some kind of a notable point, a landmark, maybe a curve in the
trail or the beginning of a tunnel, taking the measurement and then
starting it again at zero and starting over so that every segment is short
enough to redo if he needs to. And the whole thing doesn't get spoiled if
halfway down five miles in, he realizes he's made a mistake. This is uh
for Bright Angel. This is page one of 17.
Here's a summary of Washburn's fieldwork between 1971 and 1975. He and his
team made more than
712 helicopter landings and spent 144 days in the field. It wasn't unusual
for them to work in the summer when Washburn reported that they were
exposed to
an unrelenting sun and temperatures that at times crept up to 120.
He didn't report that I could see anybody having to jump up and down.
When Washburn had aerial photos and survey data collected, he sent them to
Lockwood mapping in Buffalo, New York. Lockwood managed the mechanical
process known as photogrammetry of turning the aerial photos into a series
of large scale poster sized manuscripts depicting contour lines, trails
and drainage.
This is part of manuscript sheet number eight.
It's not a scan, it's a photo. Thank you Matt. And it shows I think you
can get a sense of the detail and the precision. You can sort of
understand why photogrammetry, why Washburn was so enamored of using
photogrammetry for cartography.
This map shows the extent of the original 17 manuscript sheets described
by Lockwood. The total coverage is 164 miles square miles about twice what
Washburn had originally envisioned. You may also notice that the sheets
are numbered out of sequence
numbers one through nine represent the original map as conceived or at
least as originally funded by c the other. The next 10 through 17
represent, represent, represent additions made to the map subsequent to
the initial grant and which required a couple of additional grants from
the Geographic and Boston Museum.
It probably won't surprise you to know that Washburn was not at all
bashful about asking for things and he was really quick to go back to the
geographic and say, you know what we really, really, really, really need
to do this, add this add that get color aerial photos. They almost always
indulged him in 1974 with the fieldwork and photogrammetry winding down
Washburn and the geographic turned their attention to phase two,
designing a single sheet map for publication. By now, the magazine's
leadership had agreed to publish the map as a supplement of the magazine.
And that left Washburn to figure out what it was going to look like. From
the beginning. He'd been eager to employ the same techniques pioneered by
Swiss cartographers as he'd used on the mckinley and Mount Kennedy maps.
If you look closely at the Mount Kennedy map, you can see a number of
graphic elements that when used in combination give the map a realistic
three dimensional quality that's consistent with the so called Swiss style.
These elements are shadows created by an oblique light source, also known
initiated relief natural colors which in this case is uh kind of a blue, a
very subtle blue gray tint has remarks for exposed rock and blue hasher
marks for ice falls and crevasses in the glaciers and snow fields and
contour lines rendered in blue to represent or to suggest the snow and the
snow and glacier covered alpine landscape. These elements are extremely
labor intensive to produce or they were 40 years ago, but they make for a
, a very natural looking and and striking resource. Uh map
Washburn was from the very beginning, extremely keen to work with a man
named Paul Whitwer, a cartographic relief artist from Swiss Topo had
worked with Washburn on the mount mckinley map and Washburn regarded him
enthusiastically as the number one acknowledged man in the world at
painting colored relief starting in 1974 and con continuing well in 1976
Washburn Witz and his colleagues at Swiss Topo and the geographic's own
card, staff debated and tested and prototyped the most appropriate method
of representing the canyon, the colors, the quality of the light and the
shadows, the spare rugged terrain, the layer geology, the diverse
vegetation, the wandering feel in Washburn's words of the canyon's creeks.
Washburn was passionate about making a map that was both scientifically
precise and conveyed the essence and character of the canyon. And while he
was tireless in his efforts to communicate that vision, he could also be
rather eloquent as he told New York Times writer and author John Noble
Wilford. If you have this kind of accuracy in all detail, the overall
feeling of the country will be correct, great precision and detail, always
yields extraordinary accuracy in the sense of the whole.
These are four of about 20 prototypes that wiser and Swiss Topo did
sometime in 1975 and 1976. Most of them, almost all of them are not well
documented in the way that Swisstopo gave them to me in particular, they
are mostly undated. So, although we have tons of correspondence in the
archives and there's really a lot of it going back and forth between
Washington and Washburn and Switzerland and back and forth in circles
about how should we do this? What's the palette look going to look like?
How do we depict the geology without making it look like a geologic map?
How are the shadows coming out? What are we doing about this? What are we
doing about that? This is the wrong direction. This is the right direction.
I'm really discouraged right now. Now, I'm feeling great.
I don't have any way really to attach any of these to any of the
correspondence. So I don't know what anybody thought about the thing on
the left. Uh Other than I can suggest that the pa palette wasn't the color
palette wasn't correct. Um But the rest of them, I mean, the one on the
right is, is to my eye, almost fully formed prototype that depicts every
element of the process and that apparently was not sufficient. So I don't
know what the problem was
in any event for reasons that are not particularly clear. Washburn
eventually gave the job of painting the shaded relief to a guy named T
Tote
Thor was a staff photographer had, who had joined National Geographic in
1964. He'd been working in Washington on his own relief samples just as
Whits had done from Switzerland and Washburn was apparently happy enough
with what Por had been working on that. He just, he gave up on having whit
do it.
Sorry, I've just lost my, lost the mouse, which means I can't get to my
own notes.
Yeah.
Oh, there is, there is,
Tabor was well suited to the job. He'd been trained by Swiss Topo and, and
had actually done the shaded relief later on the Mount Kennedy map. A
decade earlier. He also had the benefit of not being in Switzerland, which
made communicating with Washburn and the rest of the geographic
cartographic staff a lot easier
using color aerial photos photos that Washburn had convinced the
geographic to pay for as his guide. Tabor started working in earnest in
1976 11 months. And more than 1000 hours later, he completed the shaded R
play that now serves as the map maps Visual Hall. Here's how we describe
the process. Years later, the heart of the Grand Canyon was the largest
and most time consuming relief that I painted during my 22 years on staff
at National Geographic, I'd like to think of this work as my relief thesis
because it incorporated all that I had learned about relief shading up to
that point,
especially vexing problem for Washburn. The Swiss and the geographics
cartographers was how to use contour lines and color shaded relief to
depict the canyon's vertical or near vertical terrain. The problem with
using contour lines to depict vertical terrain is that the lines
necessarily begin to bunch up and cluster into thick concentrated bands
that obscure the character of the landscape rather than elucidate. It. As
you can see in these USG SS maps, contour lines leave very little room for
any other graphic element naming color. When they start to cluster up into
these bands. They also do very little to illustrate the complex topography
of the terrain other than suggesting that it's that it's vertical and
that's, that's only if you know how to be contour lines in the first place.
The solution to the problem was to complement the contour lines with cliff
drawings used to represent the cliffs.
Here's a four panel sequence that shows exactly how the cliffs were
integrated
panel. One on the left is the contour lines. The original contour line lay
with segments removed where the topography was a vertical or near vertical
and where the lines would have started to bunch up and concentrate into
the thick bands. Panel two shows the clip drawings which were intended to
slot into those areas where the contour lines had been removed. Panel
three shows the combination of the two and panel four shows contours cliff
Ures and T bo shaded relief. And you can see that the drawings are
suggestive of the actual rock formations, especially once they've been
paired with the shaded relief, they also permit color to show through and
this meant to washburn that the map ultimately could show, could combine
the mathematical precision of the contour lines as well as the artistry of
the shaded relief.
This is a close up view of the clip drawings for Isis Temple. They were
drawn by two Swift Swiss Topo staff members, Alwa Fleury and, and Rudolf D
Walder who worked about eight months in, in summer in 1976 and in early
1977 according to Washburn, their work was as expected, painstaking and
slow. They might spend more than a day trying to depict with just the
right brush strokes, too thin, too thick, too long, too short, too angled
to depict just a couple centimeters of cliffs. Washburn was ultimately
happy. He called their work the exacting frontier between art and science
T and the Swiss labored away members of the geographic cartography staff
and there were other people were hard at work on other aspects of the
map's production. Research, cartographer Tom Gray worked closely with park
superintendent Merle Stitt to clarify place names and compile accurate
lists in the locations of campgrounds, archaeological sites, ranger
stations, picnic areas and other points of interest that would be that
would eventually appear on the map. The page segment here you see is from
a long list of questions he sent about, about place names. Gray also
worked with na Professor Harvey Butcher, whom Washburn had recognized as
the number one expert on the details of the inner reaches of the Grand
Canyon budget was especially useful in helping gray identify and pot
reliable streams and springs which gray hoped to distinguish on the map
from those that were intermittent and seasonal in the interest of public
safety. Gray eventually removed the unreliable water sources from the map.
In May 1978 the heart of the Grand Canyon went to press eight years after
Washburn had first purchased aerial photos, two versions were printed both
at a scale of 1 to 24,000 or about 2.5 inches to the mile. The maps are
identical except for their coverage.
The larger of the two maps ok, was, was printed approximately 34,000 times
and sold for a while at the Grand Canyon and at the Boston Museum of
Science, the smaller the smaller version of the map, if that's the one
hanging back, there was printed, was published and distributed with the
July 1978 issue of National Geographic magazine and was therefore printed
10.5 million times.
The print run required £1.1 million of paper and 17 tons of ink.
Here's the large map, it seems to have been well received. Washburn
himself reported shortly after publication that everything we had received
ranges from ecstatic to highly complimentary to be fair. We also received
some slightly bitter letters from mostly from staff of the US Geological
Survey
who were less impressed. They felt that it was inaccurate and
disrespectful to Wash's predecessor's name, a Geological survey to say as
the magazine did that the that the canon had never been mapped in
sufficient detail for confident field views by scientists or hikers.
The magazine stood firm. They said, I think rightly that Washburn's modern
methods and the large scale of the original manuscript sheets from which
this published map were derived were unprecedented. Despite the map's
limited coverage by no stretch of the whole canyon, it offered detail and
precision that had never been seen on any map or as one of the editors
wrote by all counts, our map is better, more accurate, more attractive
and of greater value to the layman than any US GS map of the canyon.
I I was watching cartoons at this point. So
in any event, the Grand Canyon is a fitting monument to Washburn's
dedication, his tenacity, his exacting standards, not to mention his skill
as a surveyor, a salesman, a cheerleader and a project director. It's
probably top 7000 plus maps. That's probably geographic, it's probably top
five in terms of
and the more i more I look into it, the more I understand why. Thank you
if I can. If I have, I have 11 brief postscript to it. A couple years
after uh Washburn published, he published a final report um mostly about
the survey and less about the cartography. And he noted that that one of
the survey stations s 61 from which he derived most of the spot elevations
on the map was found to have been disturbed at some point prior to his use
of it. So not every but a lot of the spot elevations that appear on the
smaller version of the map are off by 2 ft,
subsequent editions or revisions and reprints of the larger version of the
map incorporated the new values. So despite all his time in the field
trying to make sure that it was within inches of correct, it was, we're
still 2 ft off.
Ok. Can you guys hear me? Yup. All right. So we have a few minutes for
questions. Um Would anybody any questions out there? Yep. So she's gonna
be running around. We got one here, one there.
Having started my surveying career in 1970 I recognized one of those data
sheets on measurement and I was just wondering what kind of a laser
instrument was used for those distances I see was measured to a corner
prism as part of those notes, there were two, they were both laser ranger
products, but I couldn't tell you models or, or I think I remember reading
that they had one, one was donated by a pal of Wasp Burns. And then at
some point later on a second one came and I don't know if it was
version 1.1 or what the difference was. It's well beyond my station in
life. Um, but I, but laser Ranger was the product name. Does that, is that
meaningful?
Washburn? Sounds to me like someone who would have wanted to have mapped a
lot more of this territory. Um What were the constraints was this his
vision originally or were there constraints that from what he says, his
vision was to get the most heavily touristed part and expanding beyond
that was a cost that I didn't think he either. We shouldn't say he didn't
care about it, but I think he had recognized that what he did and what the
whole canyon represent are much, much, much different endeavors and there
was the cost issue. Um,
I mean, it took long enough for that little piece. So
I felt
ok if it will make you feel any better math has also had a problem with
elevations. There was a 6 ft, er, most of the benchmarks that you'll find
in the field, they placed the benchmarks first. When they did their survey
, you will find that the elevation on them is 6 ft different from the
elevation for that benchmark that's shown on the map
2 ft 6 ft. Anybody else? Any other questions
do? Um Mathis or however you pronounce his name? Do, do his benchmarks
appear on Bradbury's map or on Washburn? They um there are, you can see
benchmarks notated on the map. Um II I don't know
which are whos, but he did mention he did mention in his, in his report
that he relied on some of the measurements or some of the not the
benchmarks and some of the leveling done by that crew. Um But, but he did
, but I'm not sure discounted as the right word, but he felt most of the
stuff that was from 19 2, 19 3. It's too old. He had more modern
techniques and some of the stuff was, as you said, is too far away. Did he
use some of those original points? As I think so? But I'm not sure if Hopi
and Middle and the other two that he said were adequate for his use were
part of
II, I don't, I don't know, I I could probably give a list to Doctor
Upchurch who might know if, if there's overlap there.
Alright. Let's give him a round of applause.