About the Cartographer

My name is Will Robertson and I created Basin and Range Mapping with the goal of making beautiful outdoor recreation wall maps. The name Basin and Range refers to the physical geography of the western United States. The term is the most iconic description of the Intermountain West, and is the largest of the five Geologic Provinces of the western U.S.

Outdoor recreation has been a lifelong activity for me. I learned to ski at Badger Pass Ski Area in Yosemite National Park when I was five years old. I was lucky enough to hike Half Dome when I was thirteen. I started mountain biking when I was sixteen. While getting a B.A. in Geography at the University of Colorado at Boulder, I hiked many 14ers and guided mountain biking tours on the White Rim Trail in Canyonlands National Park. Outdoor recreation was the main influence for my move to Montana in 1992.

I started making maps in 1995, and have won several awards for cartographic design, including three Best Recreation / Travel Map awards, in the Cartography and Geographic Information Society’s annual Map Design Competition.

I wanted to take fine art cartography a bit further so in 2016, I started working on this wall map idea, wondering what the best outdoor recreation wall map should be. It should show your favorite trails and river put-ins, of course. It should cover a large area, yet you should be able to clearly see where you went last weekend or where you’re going next weekend, or next summer. And the map should be beautiful enough to hang in a home as art.

The cartography for the maps is the result of experimentation over a six year period. Creating the recreation features – the roads, trails, and recreation sites – was the easy part. The hard part was making sure the maps are gorgeous. They incorporate artistic details which had never occurred to me when I started working on the concept, details which I’ve never seen on any other maps.

These are the maps I need on the wall in my home. I hope they are the ones you need too.

Thank you for reading,

Will