Geologic maps are to geologists what equations are to mathematicians; they symbolically and compactly encode many layers of hard-won scientific knowledge for those who know how to read them. The best ones also are beautiful. There have been great challenges and great progress in geologic mapping of Grand Canyon over the past 150 years. Dutton era (1886) maps represent major advances in cartography and geology. The Huntoon et al., (1996) 1:62,500 “Dragon Map” of Eastern Grand Canyon is the best-selling geologic map of all time; it was produced by offset printing and is now out of print. The Timmons and Karlstrom (2012) Geologic Map of Eastern Grand Canyon at 1:24,000 is the most detailed available for large areas; it has been digitized and is being converted to GIS files. The Billingsley’s USGS maps of the entire Grand Canyon region are available at 1:100,000 as GIS files online. Next challenges are to incorporate multiple scales in Google Earth-style zooming in interactive 3-D geologic portrayals. This requires higher detail boots-on-the-ground geologic mapping than is currently available in many areas as well as innovative ideas for 3-D visualizations. Imagery and visualization technologies are available such that this “Grand Challenge” is within reach.

John Harvey Butchart was a mathematics professor at Northern Arizona University from 1945 to 1973. From 1945 to 1987, he spent considerable time in the Grand Canyon, hiking established trails, exploring obscure routes, and discovering new routes. In all, Dr. Butchart spent over 1,000 days in the Grand Canyon and traveled over 12,000 miles in the Canyon. Dr. Butchart kept journals on his explorations and complemented those notes with a heavily annotated copy of the 1927 Francois Matthes and Richard Evans East Half, West Half topographic maps of the Grand Canyon. Embedded in Butchart’s annotated Matthes-Evans maps are compelling stories of adventure, discovery, triumph, and heartbreak. This presentation will highlight selections of those stories and the impact this map has had on subsequent hiking exploration in the Canyon.

Creation of the Matthes-Evans United States Geological Survey topographic map of the Grand Canyon was a herculean effort. It was the most impressive mapping activity to ever take place at the Grand Canyon, considering the surveying tools that were available at the time. Field work on the Matthes-Evans map began in 1902, but publication of the map did not occur until 1927. This was a 25 year effort, facing extremely challenging field conditions. This presentation will describe the surveying methods and tools used, and the field work required to prepare the Matthes-Evans Map. Extremely challenging terrain and climate made field work quite difficult. Matthes and others produced firsthand accounts that provide a historical record of the mapmaking effort and some of the trials and tribulations encountered by the surveyors. These sources, plus the author’s onsite visits to triangulation stations and benchmarks provide the basis for the story of the map’s creation.

It is a truism that maps cannot exist without boundaries, whether those boundaries are the borders of the map itself or the geographic coordinates circumscribing the limits of the physical space being mapped. Grand Canyon National Park, like all national parks, has written and legislated descriptions that form the basis for mapping the evolving nature of the park. The year 1925 saw the first significant re-writing of the legal boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park since its legislative creation in 1919.  This presentation will discuss the “sausage-making” involved in re-writing the borders of Grand Canyon National Park.

Four recently published maps of Grand Canyon National Park that owe their design inspiration to renowned mapmakers of the twentieth century, a relationship that I will explore. The first map, the “South Rim Pocket Map,” targets the majority of visitors who go only to the South Rim and stay there for four hours or less. I based this map on the 1972 “New York Subway Map” by Massimo Vignelli, which distorts geography in order to squeeze information into tight geographic areas. Out of necessity I did likewise for the “South Rim Pocket Map,” which had a print run of three million copies last year. My next map, “Hiking Below the Rims,” draws inspiration from Brad Washburn’s “Heart of the Grand Canyon” published in 1978 by National Geographic. I used a digital technique called texture shading to mimic the Swiss-produced rock hachuring found on Washburn’s map. Up next in my talk is a map of the entire canyon made for the official park brochure. It features natural colors similar to those developed in the 1950s by USGS cartographer, Hal Shelton. I will wrap things up with a panorama of the Grand Canyon that borrows a clever idea from late Austrian panoramist, Heinrich Berann. I warped a digital elevation model on a convex arc to create a hybrid 3D scene featuring a conventional map in the foreground and a panorama in the background. You can decide if it works.

Prior to the 1850s, no large-scale maps of the Grand Canyon existed. Maps covering the region were predominantly small-scale products, crudely generalizing vast swathes of territory. Most maps relegated the location of the Grand Canyon itself to a conspicuous “blank space”. In the mid-19th century era of US territorial expansion, fueled by the ideological imperatives of Manifest Destiny, such glaring omissions of cartographic detail demanded a corrective filling-in. A map drawn by the pioneering cartographer Frederick Wilhelm von Egloffstein as part of the 1857-1858 Ives survey marked the first successful effort to map the Colorado River, and, by extension, its Grand Canyon, in any meaningful detail. A decade later, in the summer of 1869, a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell famously led a group of nine men to explore and conduct a more thorough topographic survey of the still mysterious lands abutting the river. In the decades following the Ives and Powell surveys, the motivations for mapping the Grand Canyon have changed, as have the technologies, the techniques, and the very maps themselves. From maps of increasing topographic accuracy, to fancifully illustrated pictorial maps, to National Park Service maps, to geologic maps, to interactive 3D web maps, and everything in between, the geography of the Grand Canyon region has been the subject of a multitude of diverse manifestations of cartographic representation.