Maps are so old school. You can鈥檛 edit them (lame!), there鈥檚 no zoom (boring), and the static landscape of frozen pixels doesn鈥檛 change to show new trails (WTF?). They鈥檙e also often inaccurate, drawn before the time of high-end GPS. 聽 聽聽
Twenty-five-year-old twins Brian and Brandon Reavis of Cody, Wyoming,聽consider these issues to be hopeless failings with traditional maps. Their solution: , a 鈥渓ive鈥 archive of crowdsourced maps built by the people who are actually using the trails.
The digital resource is open and editable to everyone.聽It uses data from government agencies, including the U.S. Forest Service and the USGS, in addition to the boots-on-the-ground info it gathers from users.聽
Natural Atlas鈥櫬犅爉arks everything from resurgent domes to couloirs, boat ramps to campgrounds, giving each its proper label and making sure the features are current.聽
The model is a graphic form of Wikipedia, designed 鈥渟pecifically for the outdoors,鈥 says Brian. 鈥淥n Wikipedia, you might find a page on a peak,聽but not on the small creek beside it.鈥澛
Sure, in many regions, you can find these details outlined on countless blogs, but the info is disorganized, requires lots of searching, and rarely includes accurate maps. The idea behind Natural Atlas is to offer all those locals鈥 tips on a single, authoritative site. 聽
It鈥檚 also meant to be multisport. 鈥淲e can鈥檛 have something that鈥檚 just for climbers or just for anglers or only for hunters. Wikipedia isn鈥檛 like that,鈥 Reavis says. The too-narrow focus not only misses the potential of crowdsourcing from multiple interest groups, he says, but also ignores the fact that useful info for one group (say, CFMs for paddlers) is useful to another (hikers trying to cross the stream).聽
There鈥檚 huge potential for winter mapping, too. A USGS map doesn鈥檛 show the skin lines at Teton Pass. Likewise, it doesn鈥檛 show ice climbs or their condition.聽
So far, the brothers,聽who quit their day jobs,聽are focusing locally, on Wyoming, Montana, and Idaho. (They wouldn鈥檛 divulge how many users the site currently has.) The plan is to have Natural Atlas cover the entire country in 2016.聽聽
Natural Atlas is still young聽and needs to keep building its archive to attract more users. It鈥檚 a chicken-and-egg problem, but adding Utah,聽the next state on the brothers鈥 list,聽should help. They make money by charging users $30 for premium features like map printing and exporting to GPS,聽and have so far resisted selling聽ad space聽to keep the user experience as clean and enjoyable as possible. 聽
For now, users can download maps from the Natural Atlas site. The twins plan to begin work on an app later next year.