Over the last couple of years I've worked on an assortment of maps with the team at Community Geographics, a small company led by Stephen Engle that provides cartography and other geographic services for a variety of clients representing the public interest, largely in the realm of land conservation and outdoor recreation. Thanks to recruitment by the inimitable Margot Carpenter, I came on board to help with a growing list of cartography projects. That list has come to include mapping needs from the Appalachian Mountain Club (AMC), the premier outdoor organization in the eastern United States, and the oldest.
A decently sized cartography project we've completed for AMC is a new, unified map of trails and recreation in AMC's Maine Woods Initiative properties.
Appalachian Mountain Club cartography
I've known the Appalachian Mountain Club from my many visits to the White Mountains area, visiting some of their lodges and mountain huts, and using their guidebooks and maps. So, some of AMC's mapping work coming my way has been a bit of a professional thrill!
AMC has been in the map game for a long time. Its White Mountain Guide has been around for well over a century and, of course, maps are essential to it. For a long time their guidebook maps had a classic, handmade look. Since the dawn of the digital cartography era, most AMC maps have a newer, clean style developed by their longtime cartographer Larry Garland. Some of our recent work for AMC has been assorted updates to existing maps, but we've had a couple of opportunities to make new maps, for which we've worked on a style that supports AMC's new branding and graphic identity.
Maps from the 1936 (left) and 2007 (right) AMC White Mountain Guide
A new trail map we designed for AMC's Noble View Outdoor Center in 2024
Maine Woods Initiative
AMC's Maine Woods Initiative is a large recreation and land conservation endeavor in, well, the Maine Woods around the (in)famous 100-Mile Wilderness along the Appalachian Trail. To date, AMC has acquired nearly 130,000 acres in the region for permanent protection. AMC's properties include three lodges and some 130 miles of trails for use both in summer and winter.
Community Geographics has been supporting a recreational inventory in the area, and has produced trail maps including redesigned winter trail maps that I helped with last year. The existing trail maps are pairs focused on the trails around the lodges with inset maps showing connections between the two areas.
2025 ski trail maps
The entire summer map extent
A unified map
The new summer trail map, too, is split between the north and south. But now we're moving toward a unified map of the entire property, which includes sizeable portions that don't (yet?) have many trails or recreational facilities. It's really one large map that, some day, could be printed as a foldable map. The north and south maps are overlapping sub-sections of this large map. (We're also working on adapting this main map for new overlapping layouts for the winter ski trail maps.)
Assembling the map
There's nothing earth-shattering about the design of this map. It's simply a map that tries to be complete, useful, and attractive—like all the maps by Community Geographics, especially when Margot is behind the wheel. Colors and typography are guided by AMC's branding.
It shouldn't surprise me after all these years, but there is simply a lot of stuff that needs to be rounded up for a map like this! This is a relatively constrained area, but it still involved getting data from a number of different agencies (as well as people on the ground) to cover everything both within the AMC parcels and the surrounding area. And, of course, once we have the data, it needs to fit on the map legibly. As fun as it was to play around with hillshades and such, most of my effort went toward labeling things!
Some day, perhaps, I'll make the trip up to the Maine Woods, but for now, working on a map will have to suffice!
