Adventures In Mapping

Originally posted at the Esri Viewpoint blog, here. Each year my siblings and our families gather at my father’s home in Mackinaw City, Michigan and spend the better part of a week procrastinating the inevitable forced structure of the annual family photograph. Pausing the beautiful chaos of the gathering for the brief formality of cramming … Continue reading Thinking about the Earth at Night

These maps were tediously cut, stacked, and stitched by hand. Took me forever but it was worth it. Also, I am lying these are digital maps. Here is an ArcGIS Pro resource to get cracking away at felting your own maps. And I do some pondering at the end of this blog post about why … Continue reading Felted Cartography

The freezing of Arctic and Antarctic waters is a seasonal pulse of our planet. The maps below show ice extents, per month, since 1979. This map shows 40 years of sea ice extents, color-coded by month . It’s interesting to see the oscillation between the opposite seasons of the North and South Poles. As the … Continue reading Historic Sea Ice Extents

Well shoot, I was just digging around my folders for something else and discovered this hillshade amplified map of a portion of the Grand Canyon that I did a couple years ago and forgot about. Anyway, I thought it was kind of neat so here it is, somewhat unforgotten… Happy Mapping! John Continue reading Random Map of the Grand Canyon

Are are some snapshots of a method using a handful of offset hillshade angles, each with a neighboring color wheel color. The result is a chromatic optical sense of surface elevation. Slightly different than a flattened single-band multidirectional method and way different than an aspect map. If you are interested in how do to it … Continue reading Throwing Shade: Gallery

Here are some examples of using selective hillshading styles based on a Glaciers masking layer. Glacial hillshade is icy and non-glacial hillshade is earthy. Here’s a how-to. Southern Andes… Southern Greenland… Alaska Range… Alps… Caucasus… Western Himalayas… Here’s a shoddy video if you are inclined to give it a go… Continue reading Selective Hillshading

Here is a scan of a tall accordion-style journal map of the Appalachian Trail. JK, it’s all digital. If you are interested in learning how.why it was made, you can check out the nerdy how-to here. In the meantime, wouldn’t this actually be a pretty cool thing to have printed? Continue reading Appalachian Trail Map Journal