NAKED AND MARVELOUS
The Colorado
Plateau and its Drainage, a topographic map by Kenneth Perry, is
the closest most of us will ever come to seeing the West from
heaven.
Perry combines USGS data with
sophisticated Macintosh graphics to create maps that are both
useful and colorful. While Raven Graphics maps are handsome and
accurate, they render the West in lunar grays and browns. Perry, a
hardrock geologist, has come up with a palette that gives the feel
of a living landscape. The lithographic detail is also so precise
that I can locate individual canyons – even a narrow one in the
Bear River Range where I lived for seven years.
A
topographic purist, Perry resisted putting state boundaries, towns,
highways and such on his previous maps. This one shows state
boundaries for Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona and parts of
Wyoming, Nevada and California, plus major roads and key towns:
just enough for easy reference. Yet the ruler lines and typography
are discreet, and if you step back 10 feet they disappear, and you
see America’s finest landscape, naked and
marvelous.
Chalk Butte Inc., 137 Steele Lane,
Boulder, WY 82923 (307/537-5261). $25 postpaid. – C.L.
Rawlins
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Naked and marvelous.
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