Rich maps, amber glows.
From 1945 to 1992 the United States Geological Survey published tens of thousands of 1:24,000 scale topographic maps. The maps are a feat, decades of work by hundreds of skilled cartographers, surveyors, geodesists, photogrammetrists and drafters.
These maps, 42 of which are tiled here, divide the country into 70-square-mile rectangles. A U.S.G.S. guy (tie?) inspected every inch of a stereographic (think blue-and-red 3D glasses) aerial photo, logging what the U.S.G.S wanted to locate: buildings of temporal or spiritual authority, roads, petrochemical and electrical infrastructure, survey benchmarks, water treatment plants, high and low points, rivers, streamgages, bridges, railroads, cliffs, reefs, soundings, piers, prisons, lakes, swamps, and even isolines of equal elevation: the topography.
Between 1884 and 1992 the U.S. Geological Survey drew 178,000 topographic maps covering the nation; the 1:24,000 scale “topo quads” produced from 1945-1992 divide the entire country into 70-square-mile chunks. Nine of those quads comprise this map of New York City.
It makes a bad tourist map, marking all subway lines with the unhelpful “TRANSIT” and doesn't say which bridges you can walk on. It does tell you the shapes of the forts; these were traced from aerial photos, so if it could be resolved on film + legible to whoever looked at the film through magnified lenses, it was included on a topo quad.
Straddling the CA/NV border and nestled in public lands, Tahoe is the largest alpine lake in the U.S. See desert, lake, and forest simultaneously from the Heavenly Valley peaks, take a swim, bring a tent to the granite slabs of Desolation Wilderness (which is much more photogenic than it sounds).
The map is composed of 45 topographic maps and covers 2,400 square miles across four National Forests. Great cartographers work in the USFS Geospatial Technology and Applications Center, where they make the high-effort topo quads that the U.S. Geological Survey were forced to abandon in the 90s.
Those “Keep Tahoe Blue” stickers on all Californian Subarus? Fertilizer runoff feeds algae. Lawns...
Of all National Forests, the Angeles attracts the most visitors: 19 million people live nearby and they all wanna hike, ski, pass you doing 80 on a very narrow road, picnic, tube down the creeks and dump their largest appliances in same. Unlike the rest of SoCal, parking regs are unenforced (there are like six USFS cops to cover 1,000 square miles and they're busy with dumped bodies and car accidents).
I was a temporary “1039” employee at Angeles National Forest HQ. I made maps and wore the Smokey Bear costume exactly once. I recommend a loop out of Chantry Flat and a climb to Mt. Wilson observatory. Keep clear of the yuccas. If you're in a burned area, wear long sleeves and pants to keep poodle dog bush away from your skin; it’s like a worse poison oak.
The Equitable Life Assurance Society Of The United States paid lithographers Currier & Ives for a map that included their building at 120 Broadway, a particularly handsome piece of 140-year-old spon-con.
Facing north from Battery Park: steamships crowd New York Harbor, horse-drawn carriages clop up Broadway, Central Park recedes into the distance, agrarian New Jersey stretches west. 140 years ago the steeples of St. Paul’s, St. Patrick’s and Trinity Church dwarfed the commercial buildings.
I’m from the Valley. My נפשׁ has five hues of bougainvillea, ice-pick yucca, oleander sheathed in brake dust, a pink peppercorn you probably shouldn’t eat, a pointier acorn than you’re used to.
This map is my tribute to L.A.’s plant saturnalia, where the sunlight, nitrogen and ill-gotten water flow freely, where it never frosts, where the least hospitable patch of asphalt is shaded by the largest fig tree you’ve ever seen.
There’s no place like it; there shouldn’t be another. But for now, stick your face in the fence jasmine and take a deep breath.
The Tongass is the largest intact temperate rainforest on Earth, a verdant paradise the size of West Virginia stretching over way too many Alaskan islands, mist-wreathed peaks and fjords and glaciers hemorrhaging water so blue it hurts your teeth to even look upon’t, bears and wolves and black-tailed deer and moose and salmon and “ancient murrelets” (a type of cute bird) and 70,000 souls.
I prefer NFs. A National Park says “Buy a keychain and please read our Interpretive Signage, penned by three people with seven degrees.” A National Forest says “We haven’t maintained that road since Carter, have fun.”
Best coast in NED-to-Blender relief, NLCD land cover, a sunsetty aspect, Sierras looking like Himalayas but it’s my map and I’ll -z 3 if I want to, printed on polyester film and backlit in the largest lightbox I could buy at the time.
Cities in brown (as I remember them), the mountains as in January of a wet year. Beautiful living but for the fires.
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