The Art Of The Mapmaker
Purple Lizard Maps
-Mountain Flyer Magazine
For Mike Hermann, adventure begins with a paper map.
Mike Herman believes moss grows on the north side of the dead bodies of people who forgot to bring a map. That doctrine makes sense for Herman, an award-winning Pennsylvania cartographer who has been making maps for more than 25 years. The founder of Purple Lizard Maps, focusing primarily on Pennsylvania and the Appalachian Mountain region. Herman and his team of four have traipsed the woods since 1997 in pursuit of making the best maps money can buy.
What do words like adventure and remote mean in the digital age? Following the dot on a screen is one way of navigating, as is pulling out a paper map and reading contour lines, legends and keys.
“Digital is great if you just want to follow the blue dot, or if you don't have the confidence to position yourself on the landscape using a map”, Hermann said. “But as anyone who spends time in serious outdoor recreation will tell you, you cannot get a big-picture landscape on a digital map”.
For Herman, the adventure begins when pouring over maps, spread across. A table or a vehicle's hood. He believes that planning the next day's route by the light of a headlamp in the tent defines adventure.
“To make a real adventure - to come to a crossroads and pull out your map and see your options - that is where the excitement of exploring with a map kicks in.”
“We are handcrafting maps in a way that the industry rarely does. They want automation over beauty.”
“The rush to digital mapping, bypassed design quality in return for speed,“ he explained. “You still see this today digital maps are rarely regarded as beautiful; they are simply data intensive and fast. People don’t even expect them to actually look good,” he said. To that end, purple lizard employees spend a lot of time making contour lines from scratch to capture the interval, the generalization and smoothing algorithms to produce a beautiful line, which is not the default. “It takes a good eye, and an understanding of the software abilities.”
I was reminded of another of Herman's beliefs. “We have all ignored our instincts and gone out unprepared at one time or another”, he'd told me. “I am a map maker, and even I have plenty of stories of being lost for that exact reason. Sometimes there is no map… digital data is also far more flawed than people expect. If you're following a pre-programmed drought and a trail is closed, your bridge is out, you have no clue what to do next.”
I pulled out the purple lizard map to show the fellow rider a gated two-track forest road that he could take to drop to the lower trail. In the end, the paper map won the day.
Words by James Murran