My team started the design process with a long trip to Death Valley, a 20+ year resident ranger as our guide. We needed all the days and guiding we could get, because this park is big (the largest national park-designated NPS unit in the lower 48!), diverse, and complex.

From dry canyons to snow-capped peaks, sand dunes to salt flats, I came to deeply appreciate the rugged, otherworldy, surprisingly intricate beauty of Death Valley. I wanted this map to convey as much of what I learned as possible and draw users in with its pure aesthetic beauty.

• Landcover is a combination of hillshade- and texture shade-generated illumination; hypsometric tints; faux 3D dunes generated from LIDAR data from a dune migration study; tree canopy from NLCD Percent Tree Cover data; and satellite imagery brushed in where needed to show erosional patterns and salt flat extents.
• Since this is an incredibly dry landscape, I removed all intermittent streams from the map, leavning only hydrologic labels to indicate the dry channels that can quickly become inundated during rare but heavy rains.
  

Original files available at NPS.gov