The Making of the 1967 NRC Ski Map

In celebration of the 100^th anniversary of the founding of the Ottawa Ski Club and as a fundraiser for the Canadian Ski Museum, I organized a reproduction of a 1967 Gatineau Park cross country ski trail map.  The original map is marked as an “Experimental Orthophoto Map” and was produced not by the National Capital Commission, nor by Natural Resources Canada, but instead—surprisingly—by the National Research Council.

I got together with Allan Richens and Michael McConaill, two of the men who worked on putting the map together more than 40 years ago, and asked them what made the map special in its day; for example compared to a 1933 Laurentien ski trail map.

They explained that this map effectively had four layers. The base is a photograph which gives details that would have never been drawn in.

Allan told how orthophoto technology was a new concept at the time. Orthophoto technology is one where aerial photographs are used but because the images represent a distorted perspective of the ground below, they are corrected to remove those distortions.

Michael said that older maps would have been plotted by hand. For this map elevation contours were plotted by computer—leading edge stuff in 1967—and required an operator to ensure that the heights of trees weren’t mistaken for ground elevations.

So that’s three layers, photo image, contour shading and elevation contour lines. On top of that went the ski trails that Michael, helped plot. Both Allan and Michael are skiers and said that unless you knew where the trails went from having been there on the ground, it was often the case that one saw (and plotted) imaginary trail routes based on the patterns seen in the mapping data.