Matching Items (16)
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- All Subjects: Mapping Grand Canyon Conference
- Creators: ASU Marketing Hub
- Resource Type: Moving Image
Description
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.
ContributorsRunge, Peter (Author, Speaker) / ASU Marketing Hub (Videographer)
Created2019-02-28
Description
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.
ContributorsUpchurch, Jonathan (Author, Speaker) / ASU Marketing Hub (Videographer)
Created2019-02-28
Description
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.
ContributorsOetting, Ed (Author, Speaker) / ASU Marketing Hub (Videographer)
Created2019-02-28
Description
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.
ContributorsPatterson, Tom (Author, Speaker) / ASU Marketing Hub (Videographer)
Created2019-02-28
Description
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.
ContributorsToro, Matthew (Author, Speaker) / ASU Marketing Hub (Videographer)
Created2019-02-28
Description
When renowned cartographer and mountaineer Brad Washburn visited the Grand Canyon in 1969, he discovered that existing maps of the area were "inadequate" for either popular or scholarly use. Never one to be deterred, Washburn set about making one. This is the story of his 7-year-long effort, done in close collaboration with the National Geographic Society, Switzerland's Federal Office of Topography, and scores of supporting characters, to satisfy his desire to produce the best map of the canyon -- more precise, more detailed, more beautiful -- than anything that had come before.
ContributorsFry, Michael (Author, Speaker) / ASU Marketing Hub (Videographer)
Created2019-02-28
Description
In 1985, Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt and several others officially registered the Grand Canyon Trust as a non-profit organization dedicated to defending the natural integrity of the Grand Canyon. But the Trust realized early on that issues don’t stop at the boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park. So in 1987, we expanded the scope of our work to encompass the entire Colorado Plateau, of which the Grand Canyon stands as the centerpiece. GIS at the Trust helps tell the historic and current conservation story through advanced cartography, interactive web mapping, and spatial analysis. Using art and science, we design maps that illustrate physical characteristics, cultural values, proposals and conservation actions, and vulnerabilities across the Colorado Plateau. Our work reaches a broad audience including policy-makers, constituencies, government agencies, and our supporters. This presentation will highlight some of our most recent work in and around Grand Canyon, challenges we face as geographers, and how our maps have been used to further protect the Grand Canyon.
ContributorsSmith, Stephanie (Author, Speaker) / ASU Marketing Hub (Videographer)
Created2019-03-01
Description
Grand Canyon is a dynamic natural landscape that encodes nearly two billion years of geological history, and which is also situated within a cultural landscape that encodes the names, experiences, and lives of people from ancestral Native Americans to American explorers and settlers to modern visitors from across the nation and around the world. Place-based ways of teaching integrate the natural and the cultural attributes of a place or region such as Grand Canyon to facilitate learning. For the last century, Grand Canyon National Park has offered interpretive programs and resources to visitors that hew to this place-based philosophy, enabling millions of Park visitors to make intellectual and emotional connections to the landscape and its natural and cultural history. Geological and educational research have contributed to the interpretive mission of the Park with new research-based resources such as the Trail of Time Exhibition. Even more recently, advances in visualization and instructional technology have brought the pedagogical power of Grand Canyon to the online realm through immersive, interactive virtual field trips (iVFTs), which have the potential to enable many millions more to explore and learn from the natural and cultural landscapes of Grand Canyon, including its most physically inaccessible places. Current research is directed toward rendering iVFTs ever more authentic and place-based, while also enhancing the accessibility and effectiveness of in-person field experiences for visitors and students at Grand Canyon.
ContributorsSemken, Steven (Author, Speaker) / ASU Marketing Hub (Videographer)
Created2019-03-01
Description
Over 700 known deaths have occurred in Grand Canyon from the first river exploration by John Wesley Powell in 1869 to present day. Causes range from suicides to accidental drownings, heatstroke, snake bite, flash floods, aircraft collisions, crashes and even murder. Based on the book ‘Over the Edge: Death in Grand Canyon’ by Michael Ghiglieri and Thomas Myers, this map illustrates the geography of deathly incidents. It uses a pan-sharpening technique to create a crisp, vibrant combination of layer tints and hillshades. The colours are defined to allow the map to be viewed in normal two dimensional viewing but in 3D when viewed using chromadepth glasses. The map provides a dramatic, visually engaging illustration of a unique dataset and maintain the first geocoded display of the complete record of deaths in Grand Canyon. In so doing, it illustrates the development and application of novel cartographic approaches. Vignettes describing the incidents bring the quantity of death into perspective through the telling of short individual stories, some fantastic, some tragic. The presentation will discuss the map’s creation in 2012, a recent update, and also the response to its publication. There were some very real issues faced in portraying an often sensitive subject matter, and some of the failures in this respect and the lessons learned will be explored.
ContributorsField, Kenneth (Author, Speaker) / ASU Marketing Hub (Videographer)
Created2019-03-01
DescriptionIn this presentation, Spindler will describe the work of designing and building the 100 Years of Grand collaborative digital archive and the associated challenges of item selection, description, copyright, and project coordination. He will also demonstrate the digital archive and present examples of key items of Grand Canyon history.
ContributorsSpindler, Rob (Author, Speaker) / ASU Marketing Hub (Videographer)
Created2019-03-01