Now don't everyone get mad at once. Remember, it's just someone who went into journalism, because he/she couldn't pass basic math/science. The important thing is just to monitor, and make sure articles like this aren't having significant influence on public thinking. Nat ------------------------------------------- Copyright 2001 The Denver Post Corporation The Denver Post July 24, 2001 Tuesday 2D EDITION SECTION: DENVER & THE WEST; Pg. B-09 LENGTH: 870 words HEADLINE: Another mapmaking revolution BYLINE: By Penelope Purdy, BODY: The U.S. Geological Survey, purveyor of America's definitive maps, has spent your tax money on a new system that makes the most used detailed terrain maps, called topos, less useful. Few items are more essential to a backcountry traveler than accurate topological maps. They not only show roads and trails, they use colors and contour lines to depict steep hillsides, deep canyons, rugged peaks and impassable bogs. Even in the age of Global Positioning Systems, a topo remains uniquely suited for specific tasks. It is the end product of centuries of human attempts to show the world in a useful way, as much a statement about our civilization as it is of the physical world. The most detailed topos used by the general public are 7.5 minute quadrangles. In the past, the 'seven-and-half quads' showed terrain in 40-foot intervals, so if there was a 50-foot cliff in the way, you could avoid it. Now the USGS has embraced a 20-meter contour interval. The metric system might have worked - if the bureaucrats had chosen a reasonable vertical distance. But 20 meters translates into about 66 feet, a vertical distance that can hide an annoyingly large number of cliffs and other obstacles. The upshot: The 21st century maps being created by the USGS are less useful than those it produced the 1960s. Surely the 20-meter standard was the harebrained creation of some flatlander who has never stumbled through the chaos of a mountain boulder field. A friend and I discovered the new maps' shortcomings traipsing around California's Sierra Nevada. The particular climbing route was fairly straightforward. The problem was finding the (expletive) thing. We spent a quarter of an entire day stumbling through the talus at the peak's base because our map's 20-meter interval lead us into several 40-foot drop-offs. People who love electronic toys may smirk that, well, we should've just had ourselves a GPS unit. But GPS has many shortcomings. Batteries fail, signals die in thick forest cover or among deep cliffs, and even the new gizmos are heavy and bulky compared to a map and compass. Worse, a GPS makes a person focus on the gadget rather than the world around them. I've been stopped on the trail by GPS users who asked to see my paper map. I even witnessed hikers stand around and argue about where they needed to go, when the path they sought was a few yards in front of their noses. Now, consider this: While returning from the California climb, my buddy and I hiked out by a crescent moon's faint light. Given the awful time we had finding the climbing route, we wanted to reach camp by a route different from the one we'd taken earlier - a tricky problem for GPS, which records only known data points. But because I'd been glancing at a topo all day, I had in my head a pretty good notion of the terrain that lay to either side of our original path. Thus, we could walk without using our headlamps. Often in the backcountry, you don't want to use your lights because they destroy your night vision so all you can see is that small circle of light. And staring at the illuminated screen of a GPS causes the same problem. Trouble was, of course, that the mental picture I had was based on the USGS' new 20-meter interval, so we still encountered several drop-offs - a problem euphemistically called getting 'cliffed-out.' You can sympathize with the mapmakers' dilemma: They need to depict a spherical world on a flat surface, so there's always some distortion - it's like trying to detail a basketball on a postage stamp. But if mapmakers pick the wrong mathematical formula, or projection, the map ends up unsuitable for broader use. That's basically what's happened to USGS quads. That's also what happened to a dude named Gerardus Mercator who invented a decent map for navigating oceans in the mid-latitudes. His projection was part of the massive 16th century revolution in cartography, which erupted as knowledge of the Western Hemisphere reached the emerging scientific caste in Europe and forever changed how humans envision their world. Trouble was, people misused Mercator's map to form government policy, too. And since Mercator's projection showed Europe disproportionately large and minimized Africa and other southern locales, it skewed the world view widely held by generations of politicians and school kids. It was a classic case of misunderstanding the product of technology - for maps are as much about politics as geography. Today, satellites and computers are fomenting another mapmaking revolution, the likes of which civilization hasn't seen since Mercator's era. Maps are, in a sense, the very foundation upon which our society has been built and continues to evolve. But like politics, sometimes technology embraces silly notions. And the 20-meter interval is a classic case of a technocrat's convenience overriding the needs of the on-the-ground user. Penelope Purdy ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) is a member of The Denver Post editorial board.
