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Modern-day Lewis and Clark put backcountry on map
http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/10/28/modern...
Cartographers face loneliness, wild terrain
By John O'Dell
October 28, 2004
VIRGIN MOUNTAINS, Ariz. -- Shane Henry steered his truck along a dusty road, emerging from a steep, cool pine forest and dead-ending on the edge of a
precipice. The uncharted spot provided a breathtaking, 30-mile-wide panoramic view of the Virgin River Gorge, stretching northeast into Utah.
For Henry, a field cartographer for the Automobile Club of Southern California, it was a great day of discovery. After finding the overlook, he
spotted ruins of a forgotten century-old cattle ranch near a pair of freshwater springs. Between overlook and ruins, he had also found 10 miles of a
drivable dirt road. None are on the Auto Club's current ''Indian Country" road map, but all his finds will be on a new version due out in two years.
Despite the popularity of Global Positioning System navigation and earth-blanketing satellite photography, there are still places few have seen and
roads few have traveled. Henry and his senior road-mapping colleague, John Skinner, are helping to find them.
The duo of Skinner and Henry doesn't have the same poetic ring as Lewis and Clark. But 200 years after the famous explorers began their mapping trip
through the American West, Skinner and Henry are doing much the same work, traveling the rugged backcountry of the Southwest, looking for something
new.
The two explorers are a rarity in the modern world of mapmaking. Rand McNally Co. and the various AAA groups are the primary publishers of US road
maps. Most full-time field researchers work on roadways in urban and suburban areas.
Skinner and Henry ''are probably the only ones in the [United States] doing what they do" with backcountry mapping, says Bill Scharf, head of the Auto
Club's cartography division. The Los Angeles-based club publishes 90 different maps and distributes 7 million road maps annually. It tries to update
them every other year.
Every dirt road and trail shown on them eventually will be driven and rated by the Auto Club's field cartographers. But they rarely work together.
''There's too much work to do to team up," Skinner says.
Each spends 10 months a year on the road, racking up about 60,000 miles in their four-wheel-drive trucks. The Auto Club provides the trucks, which are
adorned with the club's logo and a banner: ''Map Unit."
Their territory is vast. Skinner and Henry cover the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, rural regions of 13 Southern California counties and all of
Baja California. They also map the Four Corners area -- a 130,000-square-mile region surrounding the point where Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and
Utah all touch -- which is included in the club's celebrated Indian Country map.
The Indian Country map is a fixture in tourists' cars and ranchers' pickups. The map's accuracy is why ''everyone around here uses it," says Ed
Chamberlin, curator of the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site museum on the Navajo Reservation in Ganado, Ariz.
Novelist Tony Hillerman, whose mysteries featuring Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn have brought the Four Corners region alive for
millions of readers, also has made the map a key part of his fictional cop's crime-fighting arsenal.
Skinner and Henry work in trucks loaded with GPS navigation systems and highly detailed federal topographical maps to trace their tracks. Backseats
and cargo areas are filled with piles of extra maps, cellphones, tents, and food. They carry jacks, flares, survival kits, tire pumps, extra fuel
lines, transmission oil, and fan belts.
As they drive, Skinner and Henry continually check special odometers, accurate to within one-thousandth of a mile, to verify that the distances
already listed on maps are precise. They also rate road conditions to ensure that routes haven't been washed out by flash floods or altered by
construction or mining. Their discoveries may include stone quarries, mines, washes, overlooks, abandoned towns, and a dizzying variety of unpaved
roads.
Dirt roads on AAA maps are rated from graded and gravel-topped thoroughfares to badly eroded and rutted tracks best suited for four-wheel-drive
enthusiasts.
''We want to make sure that if a mom in her Volvo decides to take one of these roads, she'll be able to make it," Henry says.
On the job, Skinner and Henry usually sleep in motels, not tents. Still, notes Denis Cosgrove, a cultural geography professor at the University of
California, Los Angeles, the two are throwbacks who resemble ''the early topographers, trekking out into inaccessible places and trying to reduce a
part of the world to a page on a map."
The job has its perils.
Skinner and Henry have had encounters with mountain lions and rattlesnakes. And they give wide berth to desert compounds littered with the glass vials
and metal cooking pots that mark the illegal drug-making operations of modern outlaws.
The mapmakers say their work requires a big helping of self-confidence. Henry was on a rough dirt road in the mountains northwest of Lake Powell in
Utah when he saw the road ahead disappearing between some rocks. Usually he would get out and walk the route to see where it went before proceeding,
but it was late and he was tired, so he just drove on.
As Henry passed the curve it turned into a narrow, terrifying stretch made up of loose rock rubble with a 200-foot drop on one side. He kept going, in
part because an Auto Club map indicated that the road led across the mountain summit.
But about 200 yards from the top he found himself trapped. The road's loose rock had turned into a series of 18-inch-high granite ledges.
''Those steps were just a little too high for my truck tires to roll over," Henry says.
He couldn't make a U-turn because the road was too narrow. One option was to back downhill, but he faced a milelong path of scree with the long drop
on one side. So he decided to keep going up. He exited the truck very carefully, so he wouldn't slip into the precipice, then gathered rocks to build
a little ramp so he could drive over the step. Then every 30 feet or so he stopped because of another granite step and had to build a new ramp. It
took Henry four hours to drive 200 yards.
''This is a good example of why we drive all these roads," he says. On the older map it showed as a rough but usable dirt road across the summit.
''But it had deteriorated so badly it was impassible for most people, so I took it out" for the new map, he says.
Skinner and Henry can trace their jobs back to 1905, when AAA published its first roadmap and helped pioneer the roadmap industry at a time when
motorists were few and marked roads fewer. In those days, maps were basically logbooks written to describe trips with descriptions of key geographic
spots, gas stations, historical buildings, river bends, anything to guide drivers.
Later, auto clubs and other promoters invented names for roads and posted road signs for travelers to follow. But there was no uniformity.
The same road could be called one name by a city, another by a real estate developer who had published his own map and something else by a local
travel and touring club.
It wasn't until 1916, when Rand McNally started its own route numbering system, that travelers heading south from Boston to Florida could follow a
route that retained the same name from state to state -- as long as they used Rand McNally maps. Finally, in 1924, the federal government adopted a
uniform numbering system so that major travel routes would retain their identities across the country.
A typical day of mapping covers 30 to 50 miles of dirt roads.
On trips to Baja California and Indian Country, Skinner and Henry often travel for three weeks at time. But the Auto Club requires them to take off
one day in seven.
''It can be a real pain when you are out in the middle of nowhere, and the only thing you can do with your day off is sit around a lonely motel or
campsite," Henry says.
Although he and Skinner meet plenty of storekeepers, restaurant workers, and travelers in their work, their return visits are so far apart that
friendships rarely form.
''You do have to like to work by yourself," Henry says.
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David K
Honored Nomad
Posts: 64526
Registered: 8-30-2002
Location: San Diego County
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Mood: Have Baja Fever
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I have exchanged several emails with John Skinner in the past... Very nice person and interested in mapping Baja. This post goes well with the recent
Baja Talk Radio interview with the AAA's Baja book author.
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Baja&Back
Senior Nomad
Posts: 549
Registered: 9-10-2004
Location: Vancouver, Canada / todo de Baja
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Mood: Rarin' to go South!
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We ran across these two at Ricardo's in San Ignacio 2 years ago.
A few beers invested in the bar returned a pile of REAL interesting stories!!! 
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bajalera
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Registered: 10-15-2003
Location: Santa Maria CA
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The Auto Club sent crews down the peninsula in early days when travel was really inconvenient, and put up all those nifty signs that are now
collectors' items. But its maps never had the fine details--much less the elegant hand-lettering of Howard Gulick--of those in the Gerhard & Gulick
guidebook. Cartography has largely been turned over to computers in recent years--you scarcely ever see a really well- done map any more.
Lera
\"Very few things happen at the right time, and the rest never happen at all. The conscientious historian will correct these defects.\" -
Mark Twain
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David K
Honored Nomad
Posts: 64526
Registered: 8-30-2002
Location: San Diego County
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Mood: Have Baja Fever
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Nicely said Lera! Here are the Howard Gulick maps found in the Lower California Guidebook: http://biology.fullerton.edu/biol517dje/maps/baja_1962.html
(this link is also in my website)
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Bruce R Leech
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Registered: 9-20-2004
Location: Ensenada formerly Mulege
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Mood: A lot cooler than Mulege
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Boy It sure would be nice if thay would make new maps of Baja.
Bruce R Leech Mulege Baja
Bruce R Leech
Ensenada
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TMW
Select Nomad
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Registered: 9-1-2003
Location: Bakersfield, CA
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"Their territory is vast. Skinner and Henry cover the Mojave Desert, the Sierra Nevada, rural regions of 13 Southern California counties and all of
Baja California."
It would be nice if they put their 4 wheel drive to use in Baja and get off the pavement more often.
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