Trip to Las Vegas where maps were found in interesting places...

Last week I was on the road traveling to Las Vegas to present some work, network, and throw a big party at the Association of American Geographers annual meeting. Poor as I am, I wasn't able to get a direct flight out of Santa Barbara, so I had a layover in Salt Lake City. Not the most direct route...


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Interestingly, I did see a few maps at the airport in Salt Lake City. On my way to the gate, I saw an interesting store called Your Planet sporting a highly generalized map in their logo so I stop in the busy walkway to snap a photo. Surely everyone was loving my instant traffic jam.

While it looks like it could easily be part of a chain or franchise, you will only find one Your Planet store, and it's located in Terminal 2. Click the photo to jump to their website.


I was on my way to a geography conference were I was expecting to see countless maps, yet the ones in unusual places caught my eye. When I arrived at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas, I headed to the airport tram to take me down to the general vicinity of ground transportation. In the rush to jump on the train with unwieldy bags in tow, I almost missed a map on the floor.


Apparently I actually did miss the best part of the map just behind me embedded in the rotunda terrazo floor. The artist is Greg Lefevre, and you can see much better images than I would have been able to take of his work on his studio website: http://www.lefevrestudios.com/

To find his "Flight Paths" McCarran Airport artwork on his studio website, click the Terrazo/Mixed Media link on his home page, and find the "Flight Paths" link on the left. If you click through the images to the "Final Floor Design", you'll notice that the photo I took above is just a small piece of the outside perimeter of the circle leading into the tram waiting area. You'll actually find quite a few cartographic art works on Lefevre's website. Perhaps he's a geographer at heart.

The last bit of map news from the road is courtesy of my generous friends at ESRI. The sixth edition of Map Use: Reading and Analysis by Jon Kimerling, Aileen Buckley, Phillip Muehrcke, and Juliana Muehrcke is finally available. I came home with a shiny-new-full-color-hard-cover-hot-off-the-presses copy, and to top it off I got it signed by my favorite cartographic researcher Aileen Buckley. Click the cover image below to jump to the ESRI Press website to take a look.

It's a fantastic resource and stunningly beautiful. If only every book about maps and analysis could be published in full color...

I walked EVERYWHERE while I was in Vegas. I really wish I had borrowed a trackstick to show a map of my zigzags back and forth. It was pretty dry and windy during the day... although you can usually find plenty of water displayed in interesting ways along The Strip.

I'm definitely happy to be home and rehydrated.

A weekend of Wilderness First Aid

This weekend I took the wilderness first aid course offered by Wilderness Medical Associates here at UCSB. I certainly wasn't alone. There were 50 other participants in the class from all over the place. I decided to take the course because I'm out hiking all the time.

For Kilimanjaro, I'll be climbing with Kilimanjaro Sunrise. I checked out several other tour companies and some send their guides all the way to the States every three years to take the 80 hour Wilderness First Responder Course offered by the National Outdoor Leadership School. Other tour companies conduct their own in house bi-annual training where they bring in professional back country medical trainers to review any new medical protocols. So it looks like I'll be in good hands, yet it certainly won't hurt to be familiar with basic first aid and safety practices at 19,330 feet.

The instructors for our Wilderness First Aid course were Rod Tucknott, Chuck Schonder, and Jeff Baierlein.  These guys have been everywhere and have done everything.

Rod is the director of the UCSB Adventure Programs and a lot of the students this weekend were wrapping up their requirements for UCSB's Leadership Training Program.

We also had a physician in our class and several Boy Scout troop leaders.
The first day was long, but fun and informative. I arrived at about 7:55am, left at 7:00pm, and we only got out about an hour earlier on the second day.

The course structure includes lectures, exercises inside and outside, roll playing and practice. If it weren't for all the moving around, there would be no way we'd survive such a long day. As our instructor Jeff put it, "the mind can only absorb as much as the butt can withstand". Truer words have not been spoken.


With practice and roll play an integral part of the course, we had a few opportunities to switch back and forth between being patients and responders.  The first few rounds were pretty mellow, with the patients pretending to have the signs of volume shock from a kayaking accident or potentially cracked ribs from a horse kick, but the third round on Saturday was far more dramatic with fake blood and fake throwing up (of real chewed up pretzels)!

I ended up being one of the injured D.I.C. heads (Disoriented, Irritated, Combative) which lead me to totally terrorize this poor undergrad Whitney Freedman from Chapman University. Incidentally, the thought of Chapman University makes me very home sick. I was born about a mile away at St Joseph's Hospital. Based on my scenario condition, a hospital was exactly where I should have been. Given the course, hopefully we'd all be more prepared to assess and stabilize the injured in the event of an emergency.

If you think you are going to get away with just injecting a little bit of saline into an orange or a tomato to get your anaphylaxis certification, think again.  There's Whitney coming after me with a pen not long after he had to roll up his sleeve and let me inject him with saline solution to get our anaphylaxis certification. If ever we have to inject epinephrine, we're ready, even though the give of the flesh is something that I don't think I'll ever get accustomed to.  You just have to go for it and make sure the person is seated just in case you hit a nerve.  Thoroughly freaked out yet?    

I am now the proud holder of a patch, a couple of stickers, and three certifications:

1. Wilderness Medical Associates' WFA certification
2. Anaphylaxis
3. Adult CPR certification

...all valid for three years, but please don't get hurt on my account.