On (or off) the beaten trail

Since ancient times, man has explored the landscape with the intent to discover what lies beyond what he knows. Oral descriptions and pictographs first began to tame the wild earth, and as man charted greater territories, so grew his knowledge of our vast world and thus the power to rule. Maps delineated land and sea, cities and kingdoms, trade routes and military campaigns, infrastructure and eventually, even the closest Starbucks.

“A map is anything that someone uses to represent something significant to them in the landscape,” said Tom Colton, the chief mapping specialist for the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “It’s man’s way of marking his passage on earth by assigning a name to a place.”

Without maps, civilization would quite literally be lost. 

“They organize our interpretation of the world around us and how we see it,” Colton said.

Archaeologists believe many prehistoric cave paintings and petroglyphs a form of map—from cataloguing hunting grounds to depicting important events. The first clearly recognizable maps—maps that look like what we’d expect a map to look like—date to 200 B.C., uncovered in tombs in China on blocks of wood, silk and paper.

Today, the human propensity to map things is boundless: air pollution maps, human disease maps, linguistic maps, hydrology maps, weather maps, and crime scene maps. We’ve mapped places we’ll never travel to, from the deepest ocean trenches to the craters of the moon. The United States Geological Survey even publishes a complete set of topographical maps for Mercury, Mars and Venus. 

“Take a good topographic map, and I don’t think there is any other piece of paper with the same density of information,” said Dave Wetmore, a retired college professor in Brevard, N.C., and a self-proclaimed map junkie. “I can spend 30 minutes immersed in a topo map just as happy as a clam in a mud flat.”

Wetmore hikes religiously, twice a week minimum, in every season, but his version of hiking is different than most.

“Trails get old after a while,” Wetmore said.

Wetmore prefers the scavenger hunt of ferreting out long-forgotten wagon roads, old paths used by settlers, or historic logging railroad grades to the well-maintained, blazed, and signed sort of trails. 

“When you go off trail you can go anywhere you damn well want to,” Wetmore said. “You are responsible for what happens to you. There is no amorphous ‘they’ to blame. If I screw up, I know just who to go to. I enjoy the independence, despite the responsibilities and dangers that go with it.”

Wetmore has an unrivaled arsenal of USGS topographic maps to fuel his adventurous streak. Before he sets out, he studies the creeks and rivers, the ridges and scarps, the hollers and coves. He mulls what he would encounter should he go up a particular slope, over a crest, around an outcrop or down a spur. Sometimes he studies maps just for fun, mentally blazing his way across the landscape, an exercise of sorts in arm-chair bushwhacking.

Wetmore realizes he has an intuitive knack for maps that doesn’t come naturally to everyone.

“The transition is taking a two-dimensional representation, and in your own mind, turning that into a three-dimensional object. It does not come easy,” Wetmore said. “But with that skill you have nothing to worry about. If you don’t know how to read it, it is a useless piece of paper. What’s more, it is a dangerous piece of paper.”

Although they’ve never met, Wetmore has a kindred spirit living on the other side of the mountain range that separates Transylvania and Jackson counties in North Carolina.

“I can look at a map for several hours. I can get lost reading a map. It’s like reading a book,” said Burt Kornegay, a backcountry guide who’s led more than 300 canoe and backpacking expeditions. “When I look at a map and the topographic lines, it becomes like a painting of the place, an aerial photograph of the landscape in my mind.”

For Kornegay, who’s led multi-day paddle trips down some of the country’s wildest rivers, his map is always the most precious cargo. When Kornegay takes to his canoe each morning, his map is center stage, splayed across the canoe in front of him like a dashboard, encased in waterproof sheathing and lashed down with bungee cords—protecting it in the event of a capsize.

Kornegay is a map purist. Unlike the Millennial generation, content with punching their destination into a smartphone and blindly trusting the directions it spits out, Kornegay prefers to forge his own path.

“I don’t know how to use a GPS. I’ve never even held one,” he said.

From a practical standpoint, maps don’t break, don’t lose signal and don’t run out of battery. But that’s not why he shuns global position system units.

“To use GPS to find your way through the woods is kind of like buying a little machine to paddle the canoe through the rapid for you,” he said. “It sort of defeats the purpose of getting out into the wilds.”

Kornegay’s love for maps goes beyond the practical. He revels in the place names on maps and the heritage they convey. Spreading out a map of the mountains around his own home in Tuckaseegee, N.C., Kornegay ran his finger along a ridge line, pausing at each summit in the chain.

“Panther Knob, Wolf Knob, Buck Knob…this tells you about animals that were found here,” Kornegay said. “And these names—Wayehutta, Cullowhee—that tells you about early people.”

He slid his hand down the map to a wide, flat spot along the Tuckaseegee River named East LaPort, a French word meaning “the door,” a name that pays homage to the brief French fur trapping influence from the 1700s.

In this sense, maps are more than just a representation of the landscape today—they are a connection to the past.

“Everybody wants to be able to go to a place and say, ‘This is where my great, great granddaddy lived and his cabin was right here, and this is the stream they got their water out of, and this is the ridge they looked at when they sat on the front porch,’” said Lamar Marshall, a historical ethnographer immersed in an ongoing project to map the historical Cherokee landscape. “People are intrigued with where and who they came from.”

Sadly, for the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, tracing those sorts of specifics are not possible. Villages were burned and lands seized as forced upheaval drove the Cherokee from their native lands. Little about the vast network of Cherokee settlements that once covered the mountains of North Carolina and northern Georgia survived in the historic record. 

“There is a big black hole of history that surrounds the ethnogenesis of the Eastern Band of Cherokee who remained in North Carolina,” said Marshall, who lives in the Cowee community of Macon County, N.C.

Marshall has dedicated the past several years to creating a series of time-lapse maps that reconstruct the Cherokee cultural landscape in Western North Carolina during the 1700s and 1800s. The project, carried out under the umbrella of environmental organization WildSouth, has resulted in an interactive online map providing a virtual, three-dimensional, fly-over tour of Cherokee society. 

“I call it a snap shot in time. It is a reconstruction of the landscape focused on the human element,” Marshall said.

Marshall has sleuthed out primary source documents from the 1700 and 1800s, buried in county courthouses, state archives and libraries, including early surveys, treaties, field diaries of the first explorers, traders logs, and military journals. He’s logged hundreds of miles over the mountains retracing the footsteps from those records.

“When you read these maps of historical landscapes, it is like a time machine,” Marshall said. “It’s like you are escaping into the past. I can get so absorbed that, when I speak to an audience, I close my eyes and I can see the landscape.”

The map room in Western Carolina University’s Hunter Library is outfitted with large trays and drawer systems to accommodate maps in the best form: flat.

“They are in an awkward format and they take a lot of space,” said Krista Schmidt of Cullowhee, N.C. 

As the keeper of WCU’s prolific map repository, Schmidt wrestles with the map storage dilemma daily. 

Some are just too big and have to be folded, but no matter how gently, how gingerly, how lightly you fold them, the paper inevitably thins and tears at the corner creases.

Schmidt can’t say exactly how many maps WCU has in its collection. She guessed 50,000—“minimum.” Amassed over time and not always cataloged along the way, the collection largely can be attributed to a former librarian who for three decades snatched up any map, from anywhere, she could get her hands on.

“She built that collection to be enormous. Now there is a big need to get it cataloged,” Schmidt said, estimating that only 10 percent of WCU’s maps are indexed.

The maps run the gamut from an over-sized atlas of the Valley of the Kings in Egypt to a map series detailing petroleum reserves in Alaska in the 1970s.

As she riffled through a wide, flat, pull-out storage drawer, Schmidt noted a little known fact about maps.

“They’re really heavy,” she said, sliding one arm elbow-deep into a floppy stack of maps like a wedge while tugging, albeit gently, at the map on the bottom.

Indeed, map fiends never seem to have enough space for their stockpile, and are constantly refining the best way to organize, index and store them. Kornegay’s overflowing map collection fills a small room in his house that’s been dedicated to the enterprise — bins upon bins of them, stacked against the walls, in corners and on shelves. He’s never thrown out a map.

“There’s hard-earned knowledge on those maps,” Kornegay said. Other river trip guides would pay good money for Kornegay’s maps—not for the maps themselves, but for the notes he’s scrawled all over them, from reliable water sources to prime campsites.

Few map collectors have enough space to keep all their maps in one place, so they end up with a working inventory of everyday go-to maps, and others relegated to deep storage.

Wetmore even has a collection that resides in his car. He meets two hiking friends every Thursday morning at a church parking lot in Brevard with no particular plan other than bumbling around in the woods for the day.    

“We say, ‘Where are we going to go today fellas?’” Wetmore said.           

His main collection—or “accumulation of maps” as Wetmore calls it—resides in his basement library where a custom-built map box would be the envy of any map hoarder. The box has three perfectly-sized compartments for perfectly alphabetized and indexed maps with cross-reference tabs to make pairing up neighboring quadrangles a cinch.

His overflow repository is under the bed, however.

“I’ve always thought it was a good place to store maps. My wife didn’t think so,” Wetmore said.

He’s not the only one who’s tried storing maps under the bed, nor the only one to get spousal pushback over it.

Marshall’s house is brimming with maps. Most are stored in his office in clear plastic bins—which are perfect for stacking, and can be stacked quite high in fact, Marshall added.

But there’s the inevitable surplus, which, like in Wetmore’s house, seems to find its way to the bastion of unclaimed storage space: under the bed. His wife does not approve.

“When I am stuffing and pushing them around, they poke out on her side of the bed, and it is the opposite of a tug of war. She pushes them back and then they stick out on my side,” Marshall said.

Due to the space required for storage, many map collections are going digital. As old maps are updated, information is lost. 

Schmidt turned to an old orthophoto map of Jackson County, N.C., with handwritten names scrawled along the tiniest creeks, names that no longer appear on modern maps.

“Because some of the older families have moved or sold their land, you don’t always know these names anymore,” Schmidt said. 

WCU has printed some maps that only existed in digital form. But for some, the problem is finding a scanner big enough. A map of Jackson County in 1901, too precious not to back up digitally, was taken to a super-size scanner at UNC-Chapel Hill’s library. And many see a paper map as passé.

“I haven’t printed a map in two years and don’t plan to for the rest of my career. I am all about the cloud,” said Colton, mapping specialist for the GSMNP.

Digital maps allow layers to be turned on and off, super-imposing an infinite combination of variables onto the landscape with the touch of a button. Plus, it’s more cost effective to update a digital map than a printed one. “Printed maps just kill me. If I spent $100 to print the parkwide topo map last week, it may change this week,” Colton said.

When the first mapmakers began scouting the Smoky Mountains in the 1850s, the odds were stacked against them. Armed with rudimentary instruments compared to today, they scrambled and clawed their way through rhododendron snarls and over craggy outcrops. The Smokies proved some the toughest terrain early cartographers had tackled in America, chief among them the famous Swiss surveyor Arnold Guyot and Thomas Lanier Clingman, both of whom have Smokies’ peaks named in their honor.

In the 1880s, a more systematic and government-sanctioned survey of the Smokies’ peaks and ridges was undertaken. The quest to find the tallest mountain in the East motivated the surveyors, despite the formidable environment.

Fifty more years passed before a renewed mapping effort ensued in the 1920s in the run-up to the creation of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. In a heroic effort to map the gorgeous but rugged terrain that would become the park, George Masa, a Japanese photographer who made his home in Asheville, N.C., trekked the Smoky Mountains with a homemade measuring device — an odometer attached to a bicycle wheel.

Colton looks back on earlier surveyors’ work with respect, particularly Guyot’s.

“If we went out with a barometer today we couldn’t reproduce the accuracy of his work,” Colton said.

Nonetheless, it wasn’t perfect. Colton oversaw an effort a few years ago to remap the park’s topography using an airplane to project lasers onto the earth.

The new, laser-based elevation readings of the park’s peaks varied — widely in some cases — from the previously recorded elevations.

“The difference in published elevations was anywhere from 100 feet to 1 foot in difference,” Colton said.

To double-check, he launched an effort to climb the summits of all the Smokies’ peaks over 6,000 feet and take manual GPS elevation readings. To carry out the massive project, he put out a call for volunteers.

“We got an overwhelming number of volunteers, more than we could handle,” Colton said. 

Aerial laser mapping provided greater detail from the park’s lowest streams to its highest ridgelines.

“The difference in accuracy would blow you out of the water. I can’t fathom how this park functioned,” Colton said. “Of course, some guy 20 years from now will be saying the same thing about us.”

Colton has spent the past few years remapping every stream in the park.

“We have found possibly thousands of miles of new streams,” Colton said.

Colton is one of the only cartographers in the nation who has credentials to log onto the USGS computer database and edit the official topo quads.

“I basically replace their streams with my new streams,” Colton said.

Mapping in the Smokies goes far beyond the basic topo map, however. Much of Colton’s work is scientific mapping that helps park biologists with research and resource protection. One such projection is vegetation mapping. Satellite images of the park capture an inventory of the park’s vegetation every two weeks, allowing ecologists to compare it year over year. Volunteers are integral to the park’s ecological mapping efforts, sending their own findings on the trail and in the backcountry to Colton to incorporate in the park’s various maps.

“We have people who wander all around the park with a GPS looking for their favorite tree or favorite plant,” Colton said.

Colton even has a sunlight map, showing how many kilowatts of sun shine on a given point in the park each day, all year.

For the 10 million visitors a year to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, a beloved souvenir is no doubt the glossy, colorful map given at park visitor centers.

“People are very passionate about the experience they have in the park. They take pictures, they see a bear, they sit by a waterfall, they have a picnic, they go on a hike,” Colton said. “Part of that memory is being able to look back later in their life and see where they had that experience.”

While park visitors increasingly use map apps on their phones or car GPS systems to find everything from restrooms to trailheads, the ubiquitous park maps haven’t declined in popularity. At a practical level, park maps show a global view that’s missing on tiny phone screens. But subconsciously, a real map—one you can spread out on your lap or fold up in your pocket—feels more connected to the landscape.

Additionally, GPS and digital map apps are notoriously inaccurate in the mountains. The Swag, a luxurious yet rustic inn located along the border of the GSMNP in Haywood County, N.C., cautions visitors seeking directions: “Please do not use a GPS system to find us! Some GPS systems send you on an obscure 4x4 road of rough terrain.” The problem can have even more serious repercussions for the growing number of hikers who use GPS units in lieu of trail maps these days.

To ensure Smokies’ visitors navigating with digital devices stay on track, Colton uploads precise and refined maps of the park to the web—free for any map software or phone app creators to integrate into their own programming code.

“I have had to adapt how I publish maps for all these people who make the maps—Google, iPhones, Bing Maps, Mapquest,” Colton said. “We have a great interest in all these location-based service providers having accurate maps. We want the visitor to have the best and safest experience in this park as possible, and one way we can make sure to do that is to help them figure out how to get where they want to go.”

But elsewhere in the remote reaches of the Appalachians, without someone like Colton working behind the scenes to guarantee accurate maps are embedded in map apps and GPS software, there’s another common pitfall: duplicate place names and dueling identities. 

James Smith, a fly-fisherman and manager of Orvis fishing outfitter in Biltmore Park, N.C., ventured out on an afternoon drive to scout new trout streams in the Sandy Mush Game Lands straddling Madison and Buncombe counties in North Carolina, when he realized something was amiss. He pulled over and riffled through his truck for his trusty copy of the DeLorme Atlas and Gazetteer.

“And, of course, Google maps was giving me directions to the wrong Sandy Mush,” Smith said.

Smith regularly puts a copy of the DeLorme Gazetteer into fishermen’s hands as an essential piece of fly-fishing gear. 

“Phones give you turn by turn directions, but as soon as you lose service you are out of luck. If you’ve got that Gazetteer, you can find your way to anywhere you want to get to,” Smith said.

On the right course

Always carry a map. It’s an oft-repeated, age-old adage that cautions the trail novice against the prospect of getting lost.

But carrying a map does little good if one doesn’t know how to use it, says Rick Merriman, an instructor for outdoor gear retailer REI, who led a recent map reading course at the store’s Biltmore Park, N.C., location.

Merriman’s class always has a waiting list of participants from all over the map—young, old, men, women, couples, singles. The only commonality is they want to do something outdoors, and away from civilization.

“I want to be able to hike by myself in the woods,” said Mary Beth Gwynn, 66, of Asheville, N.C. “I want to be able to go off trail and feel safe doing that.”

After a crash course on reading maps—from how to use the legend to what a contour line is—Merriman puts the newbies through the paces of their new-found map and compass skills.

The class roster recently included Kary Lawson, 40, who hopes to hike the Appalachian Trail with her 19-year-old daughter next year, and David Byer, 33, who heads to Gates of the Arctic National Park in Alaska with friends in August. A bush plane will drop the group of explorer off and pick them up six days later. They are all GPS savvy, but, “No one I am going with knows how to use a compass,” Byer said.

For Susan Alderman, learning to read maps is a necessary evil in her hobby as an endurance adventure racer. 

“The most important part is navigation,” Alderman said.

Adventure race teams must plot their way cross-country through a series of checkpoints scattered through a vast wilderness.

“They are usually hidden. You have to bushwhack to get to them—up steep stuff, down steep stuff, through rhododendrons,” said Alderman, a state crime lab technician in Asheville, N.C.

Brad Dobson, 38, of Hendersonville, N.C., joined the course so he could take his kids into the woods with confidence. At 3 and 5, his youngsters are just reaching hiking age, but Dobson fancies himself a Boy Scout leader one day and wanted to get a head start on his outdoor skills.

Meanwhile, retiree Bob Lewis had less noble goals.

“If only this would work for finding your car in a parking lot,” Lewis said, wrestling to get his map folded back up properly.