Topographical maps and hiking maps are coming to Apple Maps on the Mac, iPhone and iPad as of macOS Sequoia and iOS/iPadOS 18, due out this fall. The hiking maps will be at least for U.S. national parks, and will also be available in offline mode because hiking in areas without cell service is the point. Other features coming to Maps include custom walking routes and saved places. [Spatially Adjusted]

As part of a series exploring the history of National Park Service visitor guides, photographer QT Luong takes a closer look at the vistor guide maps—specifically, the maps for Yellowstone National Park, which he tracks through multiple iterations. “Given the importance of the park, Yellowstone maps have been subject to more revisions than any other park maps, which makes it possible to tell a more complete story. This also means that the history of maps from other parks is far from strictly paralleling the evolution of the Yellowstone maps. However, by examining my extensive collection of park maps, I can confirm that it follows the same general outline.”

Pierre Novat (1928-2007) was another painter of panoramic mountain and ski resort maps working with the same techniques as Henrich Berann and James Niehues. Novat actually predates Niehues, and even Niehues’s mentor Bill Brown: his career ran from the early 1960s until his retirement in 1999. He mainly focused on French ski resorts; for the 1992 Winter Olympics in Albertville he pained a panorama of all the Savoie venues. In March 1992, France 3 aired this profile of Novat that explored his process; the above video relates to a 2014 exposition of his work. (All links in French; see this 2014 blog post from the Ski Adventures blog for something in English.)

Ski areas are increasingly cutting back on the number of pocket-size paper trail maps they print and distribute. The reasons range from cost savings and environmental concerns to promoting resort-specific apps that offer a slew of interactive features in addition to digital maps. Last winter many ski areas didn’t put out the usual stacks of maps as a Covid measure, but the trend goes well beyond pandemic protocol.

Once again we see a variation on the long debate between paper and digital maps, with many familiar arguments: saving paper, convenience, the sheer robustness of paper vs. failure-prone technology (not nothing when you’re relying on a phone to work on top of a cold mountain), and so on. Also, in this specific case, that guests might prefer a paper map as a souvenir (not for nothing did Niehues make a career out of them).

Our NatGeo Maps office here in Colorado was featured on Disney+’s Disney Insider show episode 10 that dropped today! Watch 0:47-7:15 to see our boss talking about what we do! My 7-second, focused-cartographer cameo starts at 2:30! pic.twitter.com/p49B6Z1NfY

— Aly D. Ollivierre, MSc, GISP (@AlyD_VT) December 8, 2021

Legendary ski resort map artist James Niehues has announced on his blog and on Twitter that he will be “stepping away from creating ski resort trail maps” after more than three decades. He plans to work on other projects, including the American Landscape Project, and will, for the first time, be selling original paintings and sketches of his ski resort trail maps later this month.

Previous posts about James Niehues.

To be clear, I think this one’s on Google. A lot of people trust online maps implicitly because they have poor navigation skills and have a hard time overruling what the directions tell them: this is why people keep driving into rivers and onto tracks. It’s a design failure not to account for this in every circumstance.

Hans on the Bike has produced a map of the Ottawa-Gatineau bicycle path network in the style of a Beck-style subway network map. “Is a metro map for cycling useful? I think it has a function in visualizing a network in an easy and pleasing way,” he writes. “In the end it is more a fun project than a bike map avant la lettre.”

Nothing wrong with it as a fun exercise, but can it actually be used? As someone who back in the day biked quite a lot of the Ottawa and Gatineau bike trail network, I can’t use this map. I don’t recognize the path network. Part of it is because many of those paths have names that he doesn’t use; part of it is the conceit of creating “stations”; part of it is that a surface path network that can be entered or exited at any point is not well served by a network diagram. It makes sense to abstract a subway network from the street level, because you’re basically travelling from station to station. You’re not doing that on a bike; you’re in the neighbourhood.

What’s the most challenging aspect of the work?
Showing all the trails in the most understandable and navigational way. It may not always be in one view, but I strive for the single view because it leaves no doubt about any trail connections or direction. Many mountains have slopes on more than one face, which requires manipulating the features to show the back side with the front on a flat sheet of paper. This has to be done with care since skiers will be referring to the image to choose their way down; all elements have to be relative to what they are experiencing on the mountain.

[via]

(The Canadian government tried something similar back in 2006, but the decision was overturned after a public outcry.)

The book is nearly 300 pages long, contains more than 200 ski resort maps, and costs $90. That seems high, but printing a full-colour book in small or print-on-demand batches doesn’t come cheap.

Previously: Crowdfunding a Book of James Niehues’s Ski Resort Art; A Video Profile of James Niehues, Ski Resort Map Artist; James Niehues Passes the Torch; James Niehues’s Ski Resort Maps; James Niehues Profile.

Keith Myrmel, a retired landscape architect from Minnesota, has produced two maps of the Boundary Waters region that are proving popular with hikers and canoers. The maps—one of the Superior Hiking Trail, the other of the North Country Trail and Arrowhead region—are large (26 by 40 inches) and intricately hand-drawn. The Twin Cities Pioneer Press covered Myrmel and his work last June:

“It’s fascinating how many people are map lovers,” Myrmel said. He has an extensive collection of Boundary Waters Wilderness maps dating back to the 1950s. “I said, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to do this old-school style. It’s all by hand.”

Using pencils, markers and watercolor paint, he put down information from books, maps, the internet and personal experience on a 2-by-13-foot map. The process took hundreds of hours, he said.

See also this 2018 story from the Star Tribune. The maps cost $34 or $35 and are available for sale from Myrmel’s website or from a number of local businesses.

We’ve talked about James Niehues before: the legendary artist has painted hundreds of maps of ski resorts and recreational areas since the late 1980s. I was excited to learn that he’s producing a coffee table book that includes all of his maps. It’s being crowdfunded on Kickstarter. Pledging $75 or more gets you a copy of the book; other pledge levels get you a high-quality print. Clearly there’s some interest: at the moment the project has raised more than $223,000 from nearly 2,000 backers, 28 times its target of $8,000, with three weeks still to go. [Kottke]

Previously: A Video Profile of James Niehues, Ski Resort Map Artist; James Niehues Passes the Torch; James Niehues’s Ski Resort Maps; James Niehues Profile.

Previously: John Loacker and the Kroll Map Company; A Paper Maps Roundup.

If the purpose here is to point to the route less travelled, well and good, but I suspect the effect will be rather like what happens when a travel guide raves about an out-of-the-way, hidden gem of a restaurant.

Relying on your smartphone’s maps can be risky in places where cellular service is patchy. That goes for Gatineau Park, where, despite the fact that its southeast corner is surrounded by the city of Gatineau, Quebec (across the river from Ottawa), staff still recommend people use paper maps, CBC News reports. It’s a big park, after all, and not all of it is in the city. But it’s not just about dead zones and dead batteries: out of date trail information and lack of trail difficulty are also problems. None of these problems, mind you, are unfixable (except, you know, dead batteries).

The paper maps in question include general summer and winter maps, along with trail maps for summer and winter activities (all links to PDF files). They’re not total luddites: here’s an interactive map.

Created by designer Michael Raisch to coincide with the 2018 FIFA World Cup, The Illustrated Football Atlas combines vintage maps with drawings of the respective countries’ players. For more about this project, there’s an interview with Raisch at both The Guardian and These Football Times. [Mark Safran]

The official Pyeongchang 2018 website has maps of the various facilities for the Winter Games, though except for the Pyeongchang Olympic Plaza and Gangneung Olympic Park maps, there isn’t a lot of detail. Some of that is ameliorated by this Story Map of Olympic venues, which makes use of DigitalGlobe satellite imagery; the interface is a little less than obvious, but you can navigate around each facility. See also Explore Pyeongchang in Google Earth (Chrome required). [Maps Mania]

There’s an interesting story behind the name of Pyeongchang (평창군). It’s often spelled PyeongChang, which is odd because you don’t expect camel case in romanized Korean; and before 2000 it was spelled Pyongchang. Both changes have an explanation: as The New York Times explains, “it was often confused with Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea. So in 2000, the town added a letter, capitalized another and changed its name to ‘PyeongChang,’ though most foreign news agencies declined to use the capital C.” [CityLab]

Speaking of toponyms. As I watch more Olympics coverage than is strictly good for me, I can’t help but notice the CBC’s sports commentators make frequent reference to the “East Sea”—the body of water that Gangneung, which hosts a number of ice venues, is on the coast of. It’s better known as the Sea of Japan, but as I’ve mentioned before, that name is disputed by Korea, where there’s a push to have it called the East Sea (동해), reflecting longstanding Korean practice. CBC’s use of the name is likely simply good manners.

Earlier this year Great Big Story did a short video piece about legendary ski resort map artist James Niehues, whom I’ve blogged about here on several previous occasions. Though this 2½-minute video is obviously less in-depth than, say, the Aspen Daily News’s profile of him from last year, I don’t mind another look at him and his work. [Atlas Obscura]

Previously: James Niehues Passes the Torch; James Niehues’s Ski Resort Maps; James Niehues Profile.

The Daily Telegraph links a record year for rescues of climbers and walkers in the Lake District with a lack of preparedness and an inability to use a paper map and compass. [The Meek Family]

BBC Autos looks at something that ought to be obsolete in the age of onboard navigation and mobile phones: the AAA’s TripTik. “And yet? July 2016 was the most popular TripTik month in AAA’s history, issuing 2 million TripTiks to members in a single month.” Go figure. [Osher]

The BBC also has a short video on mapmaker Dave Imus, who describes himself as a “geographic illustrator” and describes mapmaking as an art rather than a science. [WMS]

I hadn’t know about Wunnenberg’s street guides, because I’m not from St. Louis, but I’ve seen other products of the sort: locally produced, hyper-detailed maps of a specific area. (Think the A-Z Maps and London, or Sherlock Maps and Winnipeg.) The St. Louis Post-Dispatch has a look at Wunnenberg’s in the context of GPS, mobile phones and declining paper map sales. [WMS]

Fiasco Design’s Rio 2016 Interactive Map (screencap above) is a cheeky game-style enviroment that mixes Olympic venues with local controversies.

This Esri Story Map looks at the Olympic venues in detail. [Glenn Letham]

What3words, a company that assigns a three-word mapcode to every location in the world—useful in places like favelas that have no formal addresses—has partnered with an official Olympics app, Rio Go (iOS, Android) to provide locations for Rio visitors. More: Reuters, the Telegraph.

Not a map in the strict sense, AirTravelGenius’s metro map of Olympic cities (above) is clever in how it manages cities that have hosted the Games more than once.

The Ordnance Survey has created a series of data visualizations showing the most popular walking and cycling routes, based on OS Maps usage. “The 500,000 plus routes were illustrated in a series of beautiful data visualisations by [cartographic designer] Charley [Glynn], who found it amazing that the people who created routes for their outdoors adventures had logged almost every bit of British coastline. It neatly frames the rest of the data and gives the illusion you are looking at a map of Great Britain. The darker, thicker areas illustrate the higher concentration of routes and reveal popularity.” Flickr gallery. [Mountain Bike Rider]

As U.S. government publications, national park maps are in the public domain. Since 2013, park ranger Matt Holly has been uploading them to the unofficial National Park Maps site, which now has more than a thousand maps available for download as high-resoluation images or PDFs. [CityLab]

More: A-Z Maps blog post from 2013, Amazon UK.

The Aspen Daily News has a profile of map artist James Niehues, who’s painted hundreds of different aerial views of ski resorts and recreational areas since the late 1980s. (If you’ve seen a poster of your local ski resort, odds are Niehues was the one who painted it. He sells prints of them, too.)  The article names Niehues as heir to an artistic tradition of alpine cartographic art whose practitioners included Hal Shelton and Bill Brown.

Without knowing it, Niehues had become heir to an American artistic dynasty. Shelton was trained as [a] U.S. Geological Survey cartographer and produced a large number of famous trail maps in the 1960s and 1970s. In the ’70s, Shelton passed the torch to Brown, and by 1988, Brown was ready to pass the torch off to someone else.

In the early 2000s, though, it seemed that the storied line of American mountain illustrators would end with Niehues. His maps, many of which had faithfully represented ski trails for decades, began to be replaced by digitally rendered pieces whose production values placed speed above quality.

But there’s a twist: one of the digital illustrators, Rad Smith, ended looking to Niehues for inspiration and mentorship. Demand for painted maps turns out to be more resilient; Niehues, who I believe is in his late sixties and has described himself as semi-retired, may have someone to pass the torch to after all. It’s a fascinating read. [via]

Previously: James Niehues’s Ski Resort Maps; James Niehues Profile.