30 Day Map Challenge 2026-Days 5-11

Here’s another round of the 30DayMapChallenge featuring Lake Ontario. I’m finding some of these results to be less than exciting between the prompts and the subject matter, but I’m working with what I have. Another complication is the multi-jurisdictional nature of the Lake. I often need to get data from two different countries and they’re in different formats and don’t match up well at the edges.

Day 5 - Sight 

There are going to be a series of these “Senses” (not Census) prompts and they are not going to be easy. It interests me that you are not always looking in the direction you think you are at a shoreline. Usually I think I’m looking directly across the water but the orientation matters. Mostly you cannot see across Lake Ontario unless in a tall building but at the ends you can. I have seen the Toronto skyline from areas around St Catharines. Also interesting (to me at least) is that the waterfront’s of Rochester’s major beach and Oswego both face towards the Prince Edward County peninsula - as does the waterfront of Belleville across the Bay of Quinte.

Day 6 - Vintage

Using various cartographic hacks I’ve learned over the years I made this map, based on a 1755 map by Jean Baptiste Bourguignon d'Anville. Here is the relevant section of the map - the entire map can be seen at the Rumsey Map Collection here.

Day 7 - 10 minute map

I made this using Keynote, Mac's version of Powerpoint using basic shapes. It took 8 minutes. I decided to go back in to rotate Erie a bit. That brought it up to 10 minutes. This could have also been under the upcoming categories of New toolor Is this a map?

Day 8 - Utopia

Is your vision of Utopia a place with no human footprint? Not my best work and the scale is way off-those waves and trees are humungous!

Day 9 - Urban-rural

Land cover data is from Sentinel-2 imagery via Impact Observatory.

Day 10 - Prompting only.

The idea of this day is to make a map purely from AI prompts. Much as I hate AI and love to make fun of it, I used Claude and was very impressed by it (him?). Claude is very transparent- you see the thinking process as it goes along. The first prompt was just “make a map of Lake Ontario”. Claude spent time thinking about what cities to include or leave off - based on what criteria I don’t know but it made good decisions. It also spent time making sure the text was all placed on the land.

From Claude: “The outline is hand-drawn from approximate coordinates, so it’s good for orientation but not for navigation. I left out details like the Bay of Quinte and the islands near Kingston. If you’d like, I can add more cities, the U.S.–Canada border, or depth zones.“

For a second prompt I asked it to add the major rivers that flow into the lake to add interest. It gave me some goofy arrows.

For the final prompt I asked Claude to draw the rivers instead of arrows. The final map expanded the coverage area. It also added Rice Lake. Here’s Claude’s report.

“I replaced the arrows with river courses and extended the map south so the rivers have room to run.

• Niagara River runs from Lake Erie at Buffalo, past Niagara Falls, into the southwest corner of Lake Ontario. It’s drawn thickest because it carries by far the most water.

• Genesee River winds north to Rochester. It’s cut off at the bottom edge of the map, since its headwaters are in Pennsylvania.

• Oswego River starts where the Seneca River from the Finger Lakes (Seneca and Cayuga) joins it, then flows north to the lake.

• Trent River drains Rice Lake, loops east, and reaches the lake through the Bay of Quinte.

• St. Lawrence River is the outlet, running northeast from Kingston.

The courses are stylized from approximate coordinates, so the bends aren’t exact. I left out the Black and Salmon rivers on the eastern shore because their upper courses fall off the map. I can widen the map to include them, or add the smaller Toronto-area rivers like the Humber and Don.“

Day 11 - Sound

I used communication tower data that I downloaded from OpenStreetMap (OSM) as a proxy for noise. For some reason OSM data is much more dense on the Canadian side so the picture is a bit skewed.

More next week!

Bonus content - if you’re as pissed off as me about renaming Lake Ontario you might enjoy this video by Bryan Adams (remember him?)

30 Day Map Challenge 2026-Days 1-4

Another November means another #30DayMapChallenge. Last year I was annoyed at the Gulf of Mexico renaming. This year it's personal! I live part time by the shores of Lake Ontario now. For some incompetent fool to give it some stupid name and for Apple and Google immediately obeying in advance, November is my tiny protest. These maps are nothing special so far, it doesn’t help that the first 3 days prompts are points, lines and polygons like every year. Maybe we can give that a rest for a year at least?

Day 1: Points - The Great Lakes as a constellation-with the actual names of the lakes

Day 2: Lines - The US/Canadian border line as it travels through Lake Ontario

Day 3: Polygons - The name of this polygon is Lake Ontario! Hand drawn, ink on index card.

Day 4: Clusters - plastics pollution. The data source is very generalized but for complicated technical reasons the map looks more specific than it should.

Next week - the madness continues!

*Pardon the brief editorializing but it really annoys me when I look at my weather app for the area and have to see that stupid name every time. Yes there are other weather apps that still show the lake with its correct name and I should switch but habits are hard to break.

Hiroshige Update

 Update to yesterday’s post.

Steven Feldman from nowhereconsulting (also the person maintaining #MapsintheWild) took me up on the challenge to create an interactive map and it looks great! Also, I’m impressed with how quickly he got it done. You can search and even filter by season. See it here!

Map of the 100 Famous Views of Edo

100 Famous View of Edo is a series of woodblock prints of Tokyo by Japanese artist Hiroshige. Edo is Tokyo’s historic name. 

I recently saw a couple of these online and wondered if there was a map showing the locations of these prints. Of course there is!

The map appears in Henry Smith and Amy Poster’s book, considered the definitive reference to the series. The map image above is from  Columbia University. 

The print at the top is number 50 in the series, titled “Kumano Jūnisha Shrine at Tsunohazu, known as ‘Jūnisō’“. Located in Shinjuku it’s the furthest west dot on the map.

The Wikipedia listing has a table listing each print with an image, title and geographic coordinates. Somebody with more time and better programming skills could make a nice interactive map from this table with popups at each location.

Another famous Hiroshige series is the Fifty-Three Stations of the Tōkaidō. So is there a map of these? Yes!

-via Gallery Thane

Tōkaidō means eastern sea road. It connected Edo to Kyoto, running along the southern coast for about 500 kilometers. Stations were post stations with accommodations, food and other services. Here is station 2 in Kawasaki where travelers cross the Tama River by ferry as Mount Fuji looms in the distance.

Click here to see a full collection of his woodblock prints.

A Meta Map of Maps in the Wild

Maps in the Wild is an online collection of maps found out in the world. You can share maps you find by emailing them or putting them on social media. Over the years I’ve submitted quite a few of them-more than I’d remembered. Here is an example-a map of the Damariscotta River in Maine overlooking the river.

A recent post highlighted that the map of maps in the wild is back. I wasn’t aware of it to begin with but they’ve been keeping worldwide map of all the submitted maps in the wild. A map of maps so to speak. 

For example, here is the Transcaucasian trail in Armenia. Each popup contains a link to the original post where you can get more (but usually not much more) information.

These maps vary in interest from “hey, I saw a truck with a globe on its logo” to cool artistic renderings on buildings. Some are indoors in places like museums. For a more grim example, here’s one from the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

Here is one of my submissions and one of my favorite maps in the wild, a mural found in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia.

There is a comment area where you can suggest corrections - several of my listings are not located correctly. Some are only few miles off while another one is almost 100 miles away. Also there’s the “null island” effect where a post without known or listed coordinates ends up at 0,0 in the Gulf of Guinea.

So if you see any great maps out there submit them. In the meantime let’s all get lost in Iceland.

Highest Mountain Railways

In my last post, I highlighted a graphic showing highest mountain peaks and lowest ocean depths via Attila Bátorfy's Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities. His latest post has another interesting one on a similar subject. The graphics are from newspapers and magazine published in Hungary in the early 20th Century. This 1907 drawing shows the world’s highest mountain railways in a sideways view.

-from Kincses Kalendáriom - A gyakorlati élet általános útmutatója (Treasure Almanac - A General Guide of Practial Living)—published by Jenő Rákosi’s newspaper company from 1896 until 1946. Source of graphic and caption-Attila Bátorfy. 

Here is an approximate (via Google) translation from the Hungarian text:

“The world’s highest mountain railways.
The picturesque panorama, fresh air, and the majesty of towering crags and ice fields attract vast crowds of tourists—especially in summer—to the highest mountain regions. However, since ascending just one kilometer in altitude—even on a good path—requires as much exertion as walking eight kilometers on flat ground, and not everyone possesses the iron-strong legs, lungs, and heart required for mountaineering, engineers have sought to make even the great mountain peaks accessible to non-climbers by constructing mountain railways. Railways of ever-increasing steepness are being built one after another, and we are not far off from the day when even Mont Blanc...“ (the text likely continues on the next page).

As a bonus graphic continuing the railroad theme, here is a map from the same collection.

Dezső Gáspár: Hungary’s foreign trade. 1932

Hickmann's Highs and Lows

In a recent post on Attila Bátorfy's Cabinet of Infographic Curiosities, he highlighted the Czech-born geographer and statistician Anton Leo Hickmann and his early contributions to data visualization. Hickmann’s most influential work, the Geographisch-statistischer Universal-Taschen-Atlas, was published in 1894. You can view it from the Austrian National Library. it’s full of interesting charts and maps but what got my attention was this diagram.

I’ve posted before about comparative mountain heights. There’s even a post on the David Rumsey Map Collection showing many different examples of these but this one is new to me. Note that I stitched two atlas pages together to make the image above. The title translated from German is “Idealized view of the most significant highs and lows“.

This graphic has two layers, the top one for mountain heights sitting over a layer of sea and ocean depths. The top panel shows Europe in the foreground and from left to right Africa, Asia, South America New Zealand, Australia and Hawaii. Mount Saint Elias (straddling the U.S. and Canada) is the only North America peak shown*, Denali must have been unknown to Hickmann. Here’s a detail with the Balkans in front and Amerika (mostly south and central) in the background.

The second layer has the ocean depths with major seas layered on top of them, a clever way of showing many bodies of water in the same illustration.

A second grouping underneath mirrors the top ones with a focus on the Alps atop the Mediterranean Sea and its affiliated bodies of water. Here’s a detail from the third and fourth panels with the Mediterranean and Ligurian Seas on the bottom, Bern on the foreground and some of the high peaks of the Alps in the background.

*Not counting Hawaii as North America. Also Mt Hooker is a name that appears in many places but none of them are close to 4185 meters.

For a deep dive into the rest of Hickmann’s atlas see Atilla’s post.