Breckenridge Ski Resort Topological Trail Map

Kingston University London

Trail maps for winter sports often take the form of highly illustrative landscape panoramas, overprinted with trails and lifts to allow skiers and snowboarders a mechanism for navigation. However, they often require imaginative interpretation to understand the various on-mountain divides and terrain characteristics crucial to orientation and safety.

This map, which illustrates the 176 trails at Breckenridge Ski Resort in Colorado, takes a radically alternative approach to the traditional trail map by reducing a mountain, its trails, and lifts to topological primitives. The map takes a similar approach to that of the famous London Underground map, and many other transit maps, making the network of trails and lifts visible and immediate, thus enhancing a user's ability to navigate the interconnectivity of lifts and trails combined with the level of difficulty of the trails. Representing the information as a network makes it far easier to determine a route from the top of a lift back down the mountain according to ability.

In a fashion similar to many transit maps, the network is constructed from horizontal, vertical, and 45-degree lines. Congested areas are exaggerated and sparse areas truncated. Movement between the lift and trail network is indicated by a "station junction" symbol, and trail and lift names are included. Line symbols mirror those routinely used on trail maps to identify the different categories of difficulty (green for easy, black for difficult, etc.). The map won the best software integration and best overall map categories in the Map Gallery competition at the 2008 Esri European, Middle East, and Africa User Conference.

Copyright Kenneth Field, 2008, Centre for GIS, Kingston University London.

Map Book Page [PDF]

Tourism and Recreation Maps

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