Behind the scenes of the South Taconic map

We were showing off our new South Taconics map to a friend recently when he asked something no one's ever asked us before: "How'd you do this? Where did you start?"

The glib reply would be that we hired Pat Dunlavey of Williamstown, one of the finest cartographers in the United States, but that doesn't half answer the question.

A good map's first priority is to convey spatial information, but the "facts" can't be separated from aesthetic considerations. Cartography requires an artist's vision, a scientist's precision, and the patience of both disciplines.

South Taconic Range was made from the ground up; every line on it is original. Dunlavey used a stereoplotter to generate most of those lines. A stereoplotter is an overgrown version of the stereoscopes once popular in Victorian parlors, using dual images to create a three-dimensional illusion.

Once he had calibrated the plotter, Dunlavey navigated a pointer through this three-dimensional model of the landscape, recording the path he followed with a computer-aided design program on his computer. Over the course of 11 weeks, Dunlavey traced roads, streams, contours, lakes, and vegetation boundaries directly from recent aerial photographs into his computer. This process created a basemap containing most of the raw data that made up the final map.

Trails, unfortunately, don't show up well on aerial photographs. This is where I came in. Dunlavey hired me to survey the trails in the field. Armed with compass, pencil, clipboard and large-scale printouts of the basemap, I ventured into the woods.

Editor's Pick: Jug End This hike offers great views to the west, north and east. By car: drive south on Route 41 from the junction of Routes 23 and 41 in South Egremont, take the first right on Mt. Washington Road, and then take the first left onto Avenue Road. You'll find the trailhead on the right, 0.3 mile past Avenue's junction with Jug End Road. Walk uphill (west) on the Appalachian Trail, climbing steeply 0.5 mile to Jug End's rocky ledges Click map to pan

Surveying trails is, in principle, simple. I would start at a known point on the trail, sight a bearing along the trail, and pace the trail, counting each of my one-meter strides, for as long as the trail followed that bearing. I then transferred the bearing to the basemap and measured and marked the distance I had paced. Sight, pace, measure, mark. Repeat. And repeat. For three months.

One of the beauties of this process is the intimacy it generates between the surveyor and the landscape. It's a wonderful feeling to explore a place with such intensity.

It's also sometimes lonely. I spent three November days and nights camping on the side of Alander Mountain and surveying nearby trails without seeing a single person. On the fourth day of this string, I finally met another hiker, a French tourist as it happened. It was unseasonably hot, and as our conversation rambled, he eventually declared that if Americans weren't so uptight they would all follow his sensible example on a sweaty day like this: Hike in the nude.

It was about this time that an angel of grace named Bobbie Hallig offered me a room in Mt. Washington while I finished up the field work. Bobbie fed me more good meals than I deserved and surely rescued me from the low-level madness that afflicts anyone who spends too much time alone in the wilds.

Hiker on Mount Frissel

But this kind hospitality and the occasional hiker notwithstanding, I sometimes felt I was exploring terra incognita. At one trailhead, I came across a pair of state park employees.

We chatted for a while, and I mentioned one of the trails that I'd surveyed on state land.

"Hey, how is it?" one asked. "I haven't been up there in years!"

Another time I started following a trail downhill. After a while, the trail turned into an extremely steep jeep road, which eventually dumped me into a backyard. I tried to make a discreet exit from the property, but a car raced down the driveway to catch me. The owner seemed quite pleased when I told him where I'd been. "That's where I learned to bulldoze!" he said proudly.

The final stage in the making of South Taconic Range involved taking all of the raw data and making a beautiful map out of it. I'll not reveal the cartographer's secrets, except to say that the translation of digital data into a stunning map involved another great chunk of Dunlavey's time and expertise, making decisions on matters ranging from what color to make the roads, to how to place and align every bit of text. No detail was too small to consider.

-Ethan Plunkett