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Outside Magazine September 2002
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The Hard Way
I Know Where I'm Going (Cont.)

WHO HASN'T AT SOME POINT in his life been seduced by a map? The voluptuousness of the mountains, the mellifluousness of the rivers, the warm blue water. The names alone conjure images of dangerous romance, mystery, dazzling chances. Tamanrasset and Timbuktu; Massif du Kerkour Nourene and Munkhafad el Qattâra; Kirkjubaejarklaustur, Krasnogorodskoye, Kathmandu, Kunming. Maps are like mirrors in the room of your mind, expanding their dimensions to the very edges of the globe.

Which is not to say that maps always tell the truth. They don't. Maps can deceive, distort, dissemble, propagandize, aggrandize, belittle. Take, for example, the standard Mercator projection of the world. On this map North America and Europe appear enormous; Scandinavia is much larger than India; the U.S. and Canada are much larger than Africa. Using an equal-area world map like the Peters projection, you will see that India is nearly four times the size of Scandinavia, and Africa is 25 percent larger than North America.



Maps—military maps, political maps, commercial maps, even road maps—present not only specialized information about the world, but a specific worldview.

Soon enough, the handheld GPS will supplant the paper map, the compass, and the altimeter. It will become a map library and an encyclopedia. On screen, you'll be able to locate yourself on any kind of map anywhere in the world. At some point, even the most obscure corners of the world will be scanned and rendered cartographically in painful, nearly microscopic detail, and you'll be able to find out not only where you are but how to get where you want to go. The glory of getting lost will be lost forever.

Fortunately, you still need to understand the argot and idiosyncrasies of a map and compass (UTM, UPS, magnetic north, etc.) to make the most of a GPS. You still need to correlate what you see before you—bulging, diving, soaring geography—with its graphic representation, the map, to figure out where you are and where you're going.

For just a little while longer, knowing how to read a map is a necessary backcountry skill—and you can still find yourself fascinatingly tricked. It's an experience that can happen only outside, in the wilderness, the best, if most brutal, teacher.


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