Category: Sport & Recreation

Crowdfunding a Book of James Niehues’s Ski Resort Art

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
James Niehues, “Big Sky Resort,” 2013.

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.

Purple Lizard Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Purple Lizard mapEvery now and again I discover another local mapmaking company whose products are familiar to, even well-loved by, well, the locals, but not much known elsewhere: the A-Z maps and London; the Maine Atlas and Gazetteer; Kroll and Seattle; Wunnenberg and St. Louis; Sherlock and Winnipeg (that one I knew about, being from there). Add another company to that list: Purple Lizard Maps, which produces a line of outdoor recreation maps that focuses mostly (but not exclusively) on central Pennsylvania. The Center County Gazette talks to Michael Hermann, who founded Purple Lizard in 1997. [WMS]

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

The Least Popular Ordnance Survey Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

The Guardian reports on the worst-selling Ordnance Survey map, which I suspect will very quickly cease to be the worst-selling map thanks to the news coverage. It’s OS Explorer 440: Glen Cassley and Glen Oykel, a 1:25,000-scale map of a remote region of the Scottish Highlands. (Buy it at Amazon.) The area covered by the map is apparently spectacularly empty, at least as far as humans are concerned, with only “a few dozen houses,” most of which are used for vacation or hunting purposes. In a blog post today, the Ordnance Survey goes into more detail, listing the 10 least popular maps in the U.K.: they’re all in Scotland, so they also give the least popular maps for England and Wales.

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.

Gatineau Park Recommends Paper Maps

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
Gatineau Park (National Capital Commission)

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.

The Illustrated Football Atlas

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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 Pyeongchang Winter Games: Maps and Toponyms

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.

A Video Profile of James Niehues, Ski Resort Map Artist

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

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.

A Paper Maps Roundup

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

Suddenly I’ve got several links in the queue about paper maps and the use and making thereof:

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]

Mapping the Rio Olympics

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

rio-interactive-screenshot

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.

metro-map-olympics

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 Maps Britain’s Favourite Routes

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

os-popular-paths

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]

The California Hiking Map

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

california-hiking-map The California Hiking Map is a poster-sized (40″×60″) map of California that purports to show all of the state’s hiking trails on a single map. “The trails shown generally include hiking trails, Class 1 bike paths, and fire roads closed to vehicles. This map also highlights select long distance trails and historical trails. Insets were made for some areas that have a high volume of trails in close proximity.” The result of two years work and a Kickstarter campaign, the map costs $20 plus tax and shipping. [Ryan Mik]

A-Z Adventure Atlas Series

Published on by Jonathan Crowe

az-adventure-atlasLondon Hiker reviews the A-Z Adventure Atlas series of maps. “They contain 1:25,000 scale Ordnance Survey maps, but in a book format, like the A-Z street map books you’re probably used to. […] Many of the new A-Z style map books are extremely convenient and are fast becoming a favourite with me, depending on the circumstances.”

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

James Niehues Passes the Torch

Published on by Jonathan Crowe
niehues-sugarloaf
James Niehues, Sugarloaf, Maine, 2000.

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.