Strange Twists in a Geographic Life

In May 2022, I was hired by the Office of Park Planning in the Central Office of the Florida Park Service. During my initial job interview with the planning manager and bureau chief, I let my prospective bosses know up front that I was formally requesting a heavy mapping workload if hired. I promised that I would go out of my way to learn ESRI’s ArcGIS program as quickly as possible. At that point, I had not touched a GIS (Geographic Information Systems) program since using ESRI's ArcMap during my undergraduate studies at Florida State University in 2009 and would need to learn the newer software program, ArcGIS Pro, from scratch.

To reassure my interviewers, I shared that I was a lifelong map addict and enjoyed memorizing geographic information as a kid; for example, when I was in second grade, I became highly competitive with a classmate named Ryan with a set of flashcards that highlighted a single U.S. state on a blank map, with state names and capitals on the back. Within a few weeks of multiple competitive sessions against Ryan, I had mastered U.S. geography basics. By sixth grade, I had memorized the capitals of all world countries and within a couple of years, I had memorized the U.S. Interstate Highway system. My ability to recall this information on a dime became a bit of a novelty and a popular party trick in high school.

After I was hired into the Office of Park Planning, I struggled to contain my excitement as an IT staffer installed ESRI's ArcGIS Pro software onto my new work computer on my first day on the job. I had this great feeling like everything was falling into place and coming full-circle. My first assignments were highly enjoyable; they included helping another planner write the Cultural Resources section for a Unit Management Plan update for Bald Point and Ochlockonee River State Parks, while also having the honor of developing a Unit Management Plan Amendment for William "Billy Joe" Rish Recreation Area, a newly acquired 100-acre park on Cape San Blas designed for persons with disabilities to enjoy the beach.

The amendment I was developing for Rish Recreation Area, in consultation with my planning manager, was my first opportunity to learn ArcGIS Pro basics and familiarize myself with the extensive geographic data collections maintained by the Florida Park Service and Florida Department of Environmental Protection (DEP). I quickly learned how to navigate the trove of park data within our main geodatabase. Shapefiles within the geodatabase represented park structures, trails, walkways, natural communities, boundaries, and other elements for the entire system of 175 parks. In developing simple maps for Rish Recreation Area, a small parcel of land, I learned how to symbolize (stylize) and balance these elements appropriately, depending on the map theme.

Meanwhile, my planning manager had long dreamed of packaging park management plans into well-organized districtwide plans, which were divided into individual "park chapters.” Ambitious by his very nature, he wanted to start with the largest district in the system with the most state parks: District 2 of the Florida Park Service, which encompassed the northeast corner of Florida in a triangular shape from Crystal River in the southwest, to Fernandina Beach in the northeast, to the Aucilla River in the northwest. As he described these plans to me, I realized that I had joined the Park Planning team at just the right time. The majority of the 45 parks in District 2 required site visits, updated maps, and well-written management plan updates, which included goals and objectives for preserving and maintaining the natural and cultural resources that made each park special and worthy of protection. Travel, cartography, and writing, three of my favorite pastimes, were all packaged into one job.

In early June 2022, after only a couple of weeks on the job, I was lucky enough to join my team on site visits to Mike Roess Gold Head Branch State Park and Olustee Battlefield Historic State Park in Northeast Florida. As our group was shuttled between different areas of interest in the parks, I listened intently to the group discussions between Central Office, District 2 Office, and park staff. Biologists, park managers, rangers, other park specialists, and central office staff described issues, told stories, and educated our team on best management practices while we took notes in the suffocating North Florida summer heat and humidity. I listened to expert natural resource managers with decades of experience speak about their prescribed fire application methods and decision-making processes, which were dictated by temperature, precipitation, wind direction, and other environmental factors. As a bonus, a prescribed fire was underway on the rolling sandhill at Gold Head, being expertly managed in the background as our group toured facilities, visitation areas, and the park's ubiquitous CCC-era infrastructure.

After a full day of discussion and notetaking, our team went out to dinner in nearby Keystone Heights, then returned after nightfall to the park for overnight stays in park cabins along Little Lake Johnson. Along the winding park road, isolated remnant flames illuminated the dark sandhill landscape as the prescribed burn petered out shortly after dusk. Subsequent visits to other parks in Northeast Florida offered one indelible memory after another, from climbing to the top of the carillon tower in Stephen Foster Folk Culture Center State Park, to bushwhacking on Fort George Island, to watching manatees devour lettuce from inches away at Ellie Schiller Homosassa Springs State Park (I plan on writing much more about my travels through the Florida State Parks system in future blog posts).

When I was not traveling around the state exploring and documenting issues in the parks, I was back at my desk in Tallahassee working on maps of the parks for inclusion in park management plans. Cartography was my true passion, and I was determined to innovate, think outside the box, and quickly build strong mapmaking skills. To aid me in my quest, my bureau chief went to bat for me repeatedly, and I will always remain grateful to him for the effort he showed in this endeavor. He not only encouraged and boosted my creativity; he also aggressively pushed for the tools I required to maximize my potential as a cartographer. In 2023, he secured a high-RAM laptop that allowed me to take my work home and develop new mapping concepts that could be useful for the Florida Park Service. This also allowed me to explore my passion after hours.

My first weekend and evening skill-building project was an elevation map of the southernmost Japanese Home Island of Kyushu. I wanted to choose a mapping setting with complex elevation, a heavily indented coastline, and numerous offshore islands. It was this early mapping project that opened my eyes to the value of working with annotation feature classes, which allow the ArcGIS user to have complete control over customized precision map labeling. It also taught me geoprocessing basics, namely mosaicking and clipping operations. The Mosaic geoprocessing tool allows the user to stitch and seamlessly blend multiple image tiles together to create a new larger image in the form of a graduated color ramp that corresponds to elevation or bathymetry. The Clip Raster geoprocessing tool allows the user to remove the portion of this new image that overspills a vector coastline polygon. This first project resulted in a completed physical map of Kyushu, which depicted mountain ranges, prominent summits and their heights, cities, islands, capes, and bodies of water, all with labels styled, scaled, and positioned exactly where I wanted them.

After completing the Kyushu project, I finished subsequent side projects in which I created similarly themed maps of the Himalayas and Tanzania. I also created a 3-foot-by-4-foot poster of Michigan, my favorite vacation spot, depicting the highway system, network of conservation lands, lighthouses, and some topographical elements. I spent dozens of hours working on these maps, all after hours while holding down two jobs, as I maintained a side hustle stocking shelves at a local retailer. However, the skills I acquired in making these maps were indispensable and allowed me to make a real impact with the Florida Park Service.

As I continued to build my mapping skills, I was always looking to find new and innovative ways to map out Florida State Parks. I had been admiring a U.S. National Park Service map in an Everglades National Park visitor brochure that happened to be in my office, which depicted primary park infrastructure overlain upon natural communities within the park. As the Florida Park Service produced “base maps” showing park infrastructure and then separate natural community maps showing the distribution of park ecosystems and disturbed areas, park planners continually toggled between the two maps in the conference room trying to figure out spatial relationships between natural communities and park infrastructure, and how any changes to or expansion of park infrastructure would affect park ecosystems. Inspired by the Everglades National Park map, I worked after hours on a map prototype utilizing infrastructure-heavy Gold Head Branch State Park as a test case. In addition to significant infrastructure, Gold Head Branch had an interesting mosaic of natural communities; mostly sandhill, but also smaller patches of mesic flatwoods, basin marsh, and baygall in the lower elevations near the lakes. Gold Head was also situated in Northeast Florida's Trail Ridge, at a relatively high elevation (a whopping 200 feet) and situated in gently rolling hills. Adding raw hillshading beneath these elements resulted in the final map (which may be found in the approved Northeast District Management Plan) displaying an almost-three dimensional quality that really complemented the distribution of the natural communities and infrastructure:

My bureau chief loved the prototype and requested that I move forward with what we decided to call “Reference Maps” for all 45 parks in District 2. These completed reference maps were adopted by the Office of Park Planning and are now found in the first few pages of each “Park Chapter” of the Northeast District Management Plan and published on DEP’s Office of Park Planning website.

I was also very intrigued by making improvements to the department’s vicinity maps, my personal favorites. I worked hard on districtwide maps, then smaller-scale vicinity maps of the various subcomponents of the district. I incorporated detailed elevation imagery and hillshading, refined the aesthetics and accuracy of the highways and streets, and exported map PDFs out of ArcGIS at a much higher resolution. I also utilized what was becoming my signature manual annotation methodology (that I had developed with my earlier practice map of Kyushu) to ensure that map labeling was clear and precisely positioned. Though most of my work with DEP is publicly available, I plan on adding a gallery of those maps on my website in coming weeks.

After securing final approval of our Northeast District Management Plan from the Acquisition & Restoration Council (ARC), our team began work on updating the management plans for the Southwest District (District 4) of the Florida Park Service, which contained 36 parks. Weeki Wachee Springs in Hernando County was the northernmost park, while Fakahatchee Strand Preserve, about 45 minutes east of Naples at the edge of the Everglades in the "Big Cypress" region was the southernmost. The district also encompassed the highlands of South-Central Florida's Lake Wales Ridge system of relict sand dunes that form a highland spine down the peninsula. Between January and May 2024, I traveled with my team to all but four of the parks in the district, including several remote offshore keys that were only accessible by boat.

Southwest District travel was an unforgettable experience. The district team based in Osprey (just south of Sarasota) was adventurous and motivated to get Park Planning out onto the water and deep into the backcountry. The district staff, from the bureau chief to the biologists, was a real pleasure to work with. The amount of collective accrued knowledge in the district office was phenomenal. Riding on UTVs down firelines in Fakahatchee, boat rides out to Mud Bay in Collier-Seminole State Park and Mound Key in the Estero Bay, kayaking down the Weeki Wachee River, and a choppy 35-mile boat ride down the west coast of Pinellas County out to Egmont Key were only a few highlights of my travels through the district.

In between weeklong trips down south, I worked on Reference and Vicinity maps for the Southwest District parks, ensuring that at least a first draft was completed prior to each park visit. This allowed our team to print the Reference Maps on our large-format plotter, roll them up, and carry them into the field to facilitate discussion.

In late May 2024, it was a relief to have finished our rigorous travel schedule. With initial park visits completed throughout the district, our team settled back down in Tallahassee and transitioned to writing materials for management plans for our assigned parks. I also continued polishing the map drafts for the upcoming Southwest District Management Plan, which would hopefully be ready by early 2025. That relief would only last for a couple of months, though, as the Office of Park Planning was directed to drop everything related to the Southwest District and start drafting maps and plans for the Great Outdoors Initiative in the waning days of July.

This assignment proved to be the death knell to my career with the Florida Park Service, as I was asked to produce conceptual land use plan maps under a veil of secrecy that would permanently alter the natural and visitation character of the parks in question on a profound and shocking scale. The remainder of my final chapter with DEP is now well-documented in the media. Producing maps for the Florida Park Service was the most enjoyable and memorable professional experience that I have ever had, and the loss of this dream job and the amazing cast of friends and colleagues that came with it was devastating.

I was lucky enough to be able to utilize the conservation landscape of Florida as a laboratory for mapping innovation. I was incredibly lucky to have found a place to work like the Florida Park Service, and I am profoundly grateful to all of my former coworkers, including those who were simply casual hallway acquaintances. Each each one of my coworkers influenced me positively from a personal and professional standpoint. Though I harbor no ill will to anyone in state government, I feel a void in my life that I no longer see my team in the office every day. However, I believe everything happened for a reason, and I am at peace with all that unfolded.

As the pressure of publicity coupled with disappointing smears on my character became too much, I decided that it was time to isolate myself for a while in order to solely concentrate on laying the groundwork for my own mapping company. From a map production standpoint, leaving DEP and having the financial ability to pay for an advanced ArcGIS license and the computer equipment required to operate the software efficiently have been massive wins toward achieving my professional goals, and I am incredibly grateful for the overwhelming public support that made it possible. Though the State of Florida has been my home for most of my life, and it holds a place of honor with me personally, I am no longer limited to producing maps of Florida’s state park system. The entire global landscape is now my cartographic innovation laboratory. Despite that, I have several maps of Florida's subregions and conservation lands planned for future development. I still intend to give Florida more cartographic attention than other places around the world.

After the media attention died down in September 2024, I created Ridgeline Geographic, LLC as a business entity with the State of Florida in October 2024. Filing paperwork with the Division of Corporations and obtaining a formal business identity was a prerequisite to obtaining an advanced ArcGIS Pro license, which I secured just after Thanksgiving 2024. After getting reconnected to ArcGIS Pro, my first step was to begin seeking out publicly available elevation data. I wanted to kick my company off by developing the clearest and most aesthetically pleasing physical maps of the world and its seven continents. Starting with Australia and concluding with Antarctica, first drafts of the Continental Terrain & Seafloor Map Series were completed by July 2025, followed by the first draft of my World Terrain & Seafloor map in August 2025. My initial thought was that I was ready to launch after editing my eight map products to final draft quality. However, I did not want to launch my business without paying homage to my home state. In September 2025, I completed Florida: Terrain & Recreation, the first of 50 maps that I plan to complete as part of Ridgeline Geographic’s U.S. State Terrain & Recreation Map Series. By early December, I had completed my tenth and most challenging map, United States: Terrain & Seafloor, overcoming a total hard drive loss (I was bailed out by Microsoft’s OneDrive cloud storage) and 10 hours of lost work on my most complex map product.

January and February 2026 were spent going back through all 10 map products and applying a “seafloor treatment”: enhancing bathymetric hillshading, creating point files of seamounts and other seafloor prominences, and consulting GEBCO’s (General Bathymetric Chart of the Oceans) online gazetteer to identify additional seafloor features where labels would be appropriate. I learned more about the ocean floor in these two months than I could have ever expected, and I greatly appreciate and admire these amazing organizations that provide open-source geodata and information.

In March and April 2026, I secured an office location and a large-format graphics printer. I also began stocking up on printing and shipping supplies in preparation for my launch. Prior to launching, I was able to squeeze in one more map: the Ridgeline Geographic Political Map of the World, which will hopefully gain utility in classrooms. Terrain & Recreation Maps of California and Michigan, two states that provided me and my daughter with unforgettable travel experiences, are up next. I am committed to working my way through all 50 states in coming years, while keeping new map products of Florida, my home state, in mind.

My hope for this business is that maps I produce going forward will be of great interest and utility to all who purchase them, especially our fantastic schoolteachers. I also hope to increase interest in cartography, high-quality hardcopy maps, and general geographic topics.

I conclude with a special thanks to everyone who has helped me along the way, many of whom I have never met. None of this would be possible without you.