Note: if you do a lot of hiking / mapping, get a good dedicated GPS unit. Phones don’t cut it out there. Get one that downloads as a .gpx file and you are good to go with most open source, or licensed, GIS software. From that, you can build your map from your notes and field maps.

“Weapons take” as a field geologist is entertaining. And, at the end of the traverse, I’d have added twenty or more pounds of sample to the kit. If you are doing a through traverse, you have to carry each sample as you go. If it is a there-and-back again, you leave the samples on the trail and collect them on your way back to the truck and beer-thirty.

I had friends who, while on casual, unburdened hikes, tell me I should get lighter hiking boots. All I could do to not burst out laughing.

I have known geologists that had dogs with packs.

The only blade I needed in the field was a good, but not overly endowed, Swiss Army Knife. Like a good friend, they are.

I’ve been tempted to draft some maps myself – I must be the last person from my generation that took a pen-and-paper drafting class – but that means lugging the pencils and papers out there, which I’m not a fan of. Maybe if I got a mule, a pickup truck, or a Boston Dynamics robot…

(Yes Pod, they still make razor blades. Best shaving tool, barring a straight-edge)

I could 3d print a lettering guide to do it…

Mrs. P. is a fan of bumwad to this day.

Learned old school drafting from an exacting master. He got mad if you used a ruler wrong – always measure from and mark at the zero bar!! The nice thing about CAD is not having ink stained fingers at the end of the day.

Thanks for the quote, I’d never heard that before.

I might still know how to use a sun compass, but it has been a long time that I had to calculate the equation of time.

In the Navy, all paper nautical charts were stowed in big flat drawers, so they could be placed on big, flat tables for use. You tried to avoid folds and creases because this meant measurements would be changed at the creases, and straight lines and angles would have little jogs in them and drafting tools would not lay flat on them.

Transferring lines and bearings/courses with parallel rules or triangles precisely is difficult, and length measurements with dividers never quite work out. Arcs drawn with compasses do not make it past creases well, either. Of course, unlike a destroyer’s chart house and bridge, a yacht has no place for map drawers or chart tables. You usually just fold them and hope for the best. Rolling takes up too much space, and there is no flat area big enough for them to unroll.

In aerial photo mapping, map manuscripts are drawn with pencil on mylar drafting film, so rolling them is the only option. You cut the stuff with a razor blade (do they even make them any more?) and the cut edges can give you WICKED paper cuts. Mylar does not crease well. Fortunately, they always lay flat, except for maybe a little curl on the edges. You can’t do Leroy lettering over a wrinkle, and ink will smear when it hits a crease.

Plotter-drawn computer maps are the easiest to manage. When the paper gets a little beat up, you just throw it away and run off another one.

I had an old textbook in one of my cartography courses, it was way out of date but it gave you an insight into how the old timers used to do it, there was even a few pages on how to properly sharpen a goose quill pen. I mastered Leroy lettering, Zip-a-tone tape and Pelikan pens and inks, which are probably a complete mystery to you youngsters.

And I still know how to calculate stockpile and crater volumes using a planimeter, a hand-drawn contour map, and a ten-key adding machine. I even know how to use a drop-bow compass!

Just think, all that knowledge and all those old skills, not just lost, but useless now. Remember, I used to be a computer weenie myself, a genuine Silicon Valley scientific/engineering programmer; today I can’t program my TV. And believe it or not, some day it will happen to all of you, too.

Mrs. P. has a degree in architecture. She likes maps rolled so the image is on the outside. I’m a geologist, so I like them rolled the opposite way. Her way makes the roll curl down on a drafting table and my way keeps the image clean when rolled out on the ground. And yes, we have argued about it.

Had a mentor who would cut up a map and glue it to fabric so he could fold it without creasing it. Had another who would poke a hole in a map with a pin and make notes on the back where the hole was. Worked on a project once where our map was four feet wide and eighteen feet long.

It’s all about how it is used. For field work, I cut maps so they fit in my field clipboard. Not a big fan of folding, but it too has it uses. One of my published maps is folded because it is a strip map and that is the only way to do it properly.

We used to laugh that all of the mines we were evaluating were located at the corners of USGS quadrangles so we would have to have four maps.

Your post reminded me of this clip from Twister:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFUSOgIjbgg