Today Tom, an HFC cartographer, showed us and told us about one of his projects. He has created some new maps for a park that you can only reach by boat or airplane. It's almost 3.3 million acres, bigger than Connecticut.
Ninety-five percent of Glacier Bay's visitors arrive on cruise ships, two of which are allowed into the Park each day. When a ship enters the Bay, a Park Ranger zips out in a little boat, climbs up a rope ladder, and spends the day on board as the ship sails up to the end of the bay and back down again.
The rangers deliver periodic interpretation from the bridge. Most cruise lines provide a room where the rangers can spread out maps, answer questions, and lead activities. On the ship that Tom visited, the crew tucked the Park's brochure under every cabin door during the night before the ship arrived at the Bay.
Tom said it was probably the only park where the rangers had such fierce competition from shuffleboard and all-day buffets.
One thing he notes when he visits a park: the habitual terms that people use to describe the landscape. In this case he heard things like "upper bay," "lower bay," and "Gloomy Knob." He aims to include place names in his maps that people will actually hear when they visit. But it's NPS policy to label maps with only those place names that are officially registered with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, and none of these terms were in it. No matter: anyone can suggest new names to keep the list up-to-date.
Except.
Glacier Bay is an official wilderness area. USGS policy resists applying new names to wilderness. Here's the reasoning:
Ninety-five percent of Glacier Bay's visitors arrive on cruise ships, two of which are allowed into the Park each day. When a ship enters the Bay, a Park Ranger zips out in a little boat, climbs up a rope ladder, and spends the day on board as the ship sails up to the end of the bay and back down again.
The rangers deliver periodic interpretation from the bridge. Most cruise lines provide a room where the rangers can spread out maps, answer questions, and lead activities. On the ship that Tom visited, the crew tucked the Park's brochure under every cabin door during the night before the ship arrived at the Bay.
Tom said it was probably the only park where the rangers had such fierce competition from shuffleboard and all-day buffets.
One thing he notes when he visits a park: the habitual terms that people use to describe the landscape. In this case he heard things like "upper bay," "lower bay," and "Gloomy Knob." He aims to include place names in his maps that people will actually hear when they visit. But it's NPS policy to label maps with only those place names that are officially registered with the U.S. Board on Geographic Names, and none of these terms were in it. No matter: anyone can suggest new names to keep the list up-to-date.
Except.
Glacier Bay is an official wilderness area. USGS policy resists applying new names to wilderness. Here's the reasoning:
Though wilderness designations are a modern invention, a fundamental characteristic of elemental wilderness is that features are nameless and the cultural overlay of civilization is absent. No wilderness is today totally free of placenames and cultural artifacts, but a goal of Federal wilderness area administration is to minimize the impacts and traces of people.
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-- Gene
In the first Gulf War, even amidst the real damage, I found it chilling that the Iraqis were renaming the streets in Kuwait City.
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