Cartography

After wallpapering my dorm room with old USGS quads, interning with both National Geographic and the National Park Service, and poring over an ever-growing collection of maps, I’m now a full-time cartographer and field-checker for Benchmark Maps. On the side, though, I still find time for a variety of extra-curricular cartographic projects. Here are some of my favorites.

I’m currently playing along with the #30DayMapChallenge on Twitter. Click here for a complete gallery of the maps I put together for this year, and click here to see my 2021 gallery.

Cascade Lakes

From Sparks to Crater

Living in Bend, the allure of the Cascade Lakes Highway is inescapable. This series began as an homage to the lakes I frequented when working as a naturalist guide, leading canoeing and kayaking trips on these scenic waters. After making a few, I decided to expand the collection slightly to include other well-known lakes nearby. It was fun to develop this simple style, highlighting the bodies of water themselves with hints at their geographic context and the bathymetry below their surfaces.

Shop the full collection →

Wild Olympics

mountains and rivers of the Olympic Peninsula

It was a thrill to be a part of the Wild Olympics campaign, getting the opportunity to make a map highlighting one of the most fascinating landscapes anywhere in the country. The rivers of the Olympic Peninsula drain rugged and remote ridges and peaks, passing through deep gorges and lush rainforests en route to the ocean. In addition to showcasing the drama of this terrain, this map highlights the proposed wild and scenic rivers as well as additional wilderness areas. These designations would further protect the Olympic Peninsula’s spectacular scenery and natural resources, preserving these wonders for generations to come.

Tennessee State Parks

Parks and natural areas of the Volunteer State

When a friend mentioned the idea of visiting all of the state parks in Tennessee, I immediately thought of putting together a map for him to use as a checklist. Eventually, I decided to throw the natural areas in as well to fill the map and highlight more of Tennessee’s varied geography. The end result was a simple map with forests, shaded relief, and major waterways providing a backdrop to the state park system. This map was built using QGIS, Illustrator, and Photoshop.

Mount Saint Elias

Second-highest peak in Canada and the USA

While our son isn’t specifically named for this peak and the national park its southern slopes lie within, I certainly welcomed the symbolism of him sharing a name with such a lofty peak. I worked on this map during my paternity leave. He was the newest member of our house and deserved a custom map to hang on the wall in his room, so in the (relatively few) periods when he was asleep and I was free, I mapped Mount Saint Elias from our home in Oregon. The landscape offers a beautiful array of forms and features with vast ice fields and glaciers, vegetated lowlands, and ocean tendrils reaching up from icy bay and into the fjords at the mountain’s feet. My favorite areas to map have perennial snow/ice, dramatic relief, and a healthy mix of vegetation classes in the land cover data. This map was built using QGIS, Blender, Illustrator, and Photoshop.