This example of my work comes from my time working in fire, where I met wonderful coworkers and had the opportunity to create a map for a friend’s upcoming book. She is a fabulous author, and this project allowed me to blend enjoyment with purpose, designing a map that emphasizes clarity, flow, and detail to help readers easily understand the layout of the area during an intense scene in the story.

This second example is a map of a place that is especially near and dear to my heart. Camp Colton is a beautiful space filled with wonderful people, and I wanted the map to reflect that sense of warmth and care. It’s a place worth visiting, where the comfort of glamping meets the beauty of the Pacific Northwest, with diverse trees, trails, ponds, and waterfalls throughout the camp.  

A simple map showing the layout of a resort.

When a place has meaning to me, I like to make a map of it. This is my neighborhood, where I have lived over half my life. It’s a bustling place with many restaurants and bars that I know well, so I enjoy seeing all of that depicted on a map. It’s home.

My first wife, Margie, died in 2022. Lake Chelan was her special place, and we made an annual pilgrimage there so she could swim in the lake. Margie lived there as a young woman, working in the apple orchards, many of which have been replaced by vineyards, which we loved to visit. I used this map to do some bartering for bottles.

This is a simple, black and white cartogram that is also remarkably accurate geographically. It depicts a route that I travel often, going from my home to where my son and grandson live. I wanted a simple, stripped down, un-decorative look to this map, leaving off a lot of major locations to focus on the places that have meaning to me.

This map was made for my niece’s wedding, which had a LOTR theme. I used a limited color palette and LOTS of pattern swatches. I particularly enjoy the idea of a sea monster in Reservoir 6. Our side of the family was supposed to dress as elves, so we all wore pointy ears. I showed up with Vulcan ears, which are apparently different. Who knew?

The Columbia River Gorge is near and dear to my wife’s heart, in particular the area she calls “my valley” between Dog Mountain and Wind Mountain on the Washington side. Lee Lynn is a wetlands scientist and knows these lakes and streams well. Of course, she says, the hydrography data is all wrong.

In 2020 I was pondering a graphic way to present the roster of Portland’s Major League Soccer team, the Timbers, and hit upon the idea of making a map. I like the idea that the approximate locations of the players on the field are recorded in the georeferenced file.

Occasionally I engage in secessionist fantasies, and when I do I make a map.

I have friends and family in this beautiful, historic nation, and I’ve traveled there twice, in 2007 and 2008. This map is not intended as a base map of the country but rather a personal record of the locations I visited and have memories of. The news has not been good for this place where we were treated with such warmth. Things were rough back then, I can only imagine what it’s like now.

The land use watchdog group 1000 Friends of Oregon asked me to make some maps for their 2005 report “Too Many Homes on the Range,” examining the overdevelopment of farmland in Eastern Oregon. This map was made for a public meeting accompanying the release of that report. The spatial data was generated from a spreadsheet listing the PLSS location of the dwelling approvals.

Another of the organizations I’ve done volunteer work for is the Bicycle Transportation Alliance (now renamed The Street Trust), an active transportation advocacy group here in Portland. In 2010 I was asked to create a map of the city’s 2030 bicycle plan. This was served on their website as a geospatial PDF (hence the note by the title, which obviously does not apply to the file you’re viewing).

When the North American Cartographic Information Society conference was held here in Portland in 2012, we were on the planning committee. The group had this idea to create a map of the city as a patchwork- a carto quilt- and invite cartographers to map their panel in any way they saw fit. No data provided, no rules given.  The final product would then be included in the conference’s poster gallery. I laid out the design with an extent based on Portland’s urban growth boundary and a scale based on the size of the plotter available to me. I put the thing together and designed the title panel, as well as one of the map panels. I’m proud to say this idea has caught on and continues as an annual NACIS tradition to this day.

My first cartography “job” (I didn’t get paid) and my first published maps were for this historical examination of Portland elections 1910-1922. My graduate advisor at Portland State, Joe Poracsky, put me in touch with Portland native and Yale University professor Robert Johnston, who was writing his book “The Radical Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon,” published in 2003. For these maps, I researched and created two spatial datasets for the precincts (which changed dramatically in 1916) then attributed them based on tabular data Robert provided. I used ArcView 3.2, CorelDRAW, and exported EPS files for the final maps. How times have changed.