The rural Ontario drive from my home to my cottage is not a straight line. It’s a 185 km, two-plus-hour journey from Peterborough to Huntsville, and there’s no divided highway connecting the two. The most direct route entails a succession of nine—yes, nine—secondary roads. It’s a series of meandering twists and turns over and around farm fields, lakes, and ridges. The signage is sporadic at best. It’s easy to get lost along the way.
Thanks to Apple Maps, I never did. I used the app for my first drive up in 2018, and for my second, and then, alarmingly, for every trip I made for two full years. I reasoned that I could not afford the extra travel time that would result from construction delays or accidents or simply taking a wrong turn and veering off course; I needed the trip to be efficient. I became deeply accustomed to Siri’s soothing murmurs and the app’s reassuring countdowns ahead of every route switch.
But as the weekends came and went, I started to worry about my state of mind. After two years of driving the route, I still feared that I could not recognize my turnoffs without digital assistance—and that just didn’t make any sense. The ride to my cottage is replete with curious places, beautiful vistas, and unique formations. In theory, the app should have freed up my mind to take it all in, but in practice, nothing was registering. My dog had a better sense of the route than I did, always perking up in the back seat at key milestones along the way. But I was doing the drive on autopilot, and while I never made a wrong turn with the map app, in every other way I felt lost. “Maps are a way of organizing wonder,” the naturalist Peter Steinhart once wrote. What had happened to mine?
In the world of interior cottage décor, amid the throw pillows and the canoe paddles, there are three iconic wall hangings: the heartfelt message (welcomes, cottage rules), the wildlife artifact (antlers, stuffed fish), and the map of the lake. Few people hang maps on display in their primary residence. The cottage is where we shift our perspective, get a bird’s eye view on life, and rekindle our spirit of adventure. The map on the wall helps.
All of our paper maps live at the cottage now. Obsolete for driving, they remain integral to canoe trips and day hikes. When you’re planning one, the big map is a big part of the fun: spread things out, gather round, open up options, broaden horizons. But we then set out on our trip, alas, with smartphones and GPS locators and battery chargers in tow.
It’s not just how we use maps these days that has changed; the practice of making them has too. Like everything else, it has been disrupted by technology. Cartographers, once a staple of every university’s faculty of geography, are in increasingly short supply in academia. Governments employ them in ever-fewer numbers too, as map-making apps have replaced drafting, slide rules, and other once-exclusively human expertise. But utility companies and real estate developers and tourism associations and school boards still need custom maps, so there’s lots of gig work to be had for freelancers.
Canada is actually the birthplace of digital mapping: back in the 1960s, our federal government developed the world’s first Geographic Information System, a computer-based alternative to paper maps that could store, layer, and analyze geographic data, a giant leap over manual drafting methods. In the ensuing decades, as digital mapping rapidly expanded in use, the federal, provincial, and municipal governments realized that they had a monopoly on geospatial data, the raw resource of digital mapping. In the 1980s, they began charging exorbitant prices for it, beyond the means of university researchers. Meanwhile, the United States charged a nominal fee for its geospatial data, which attracted experts, entrepreneurs, and investment.
From that point on, America became a world leader in digital mapping innovation while Canada fell behind. “Pretty much all our practitioners left the country,” says cartographer Martin Gamache, who was eventually part of the exodus. “The Crown copyright on geospatial data was a barrier to using the technology. You couldn’t make a map in Canada unless you were in government.”
The bespectacled, stubble-bearded Gamache was born in Wawa, Ont., and raised in a smattering of tiny nearby Franco-Ontarian communities that don’t appear on most paper maps. He has lived in the U.S. since 2001 and currently makes his home in Washington, D.C., where he is the National Geographic Society’s Chief Cartographer, a title that quite possibly makes him the planet’s top map-maker. “We are one of the very few organizations left that still makes maps of the whole world,” says Gamache, whose soft-spoken demeanour belies his passion for his craft. “We are interested in everywhere on earth. Most institutions don’t think that big anymore.”
Gamache makes both print and digital maps. The nature of his work, manipulating geospatial datasets, makes him a data scientist. But he insists—rightly— that cartography is really about storytelling. Maps are a form of non-fiction literature, combining information with colour palette, shadow, and typography. Maps can craft a narrative, visualizing information in ways that pie charts and line graphs can only dream of. As Gamache says, you could learn that 10 per cent of a particular forest has been lost to urban encroachment, but that data point alone wouldn’t give you any sense of scale or impact. Depict that 10 per cent on a map, however, and suddenly you can see a place change over time.
“For a lot of people, a map is a tool they use to get from point A to point B,” he says. “We make maps to help people understand their destination, to bring them to an unfamiliar location. I love a map that truly conveys a sense of place, that helps me imagine my journey and gets me excited about going somewhere.”
Storytelling aside, however, everybody relies on maps for their A-to-B wayfinding. Digital maps perform this task exceptionally well when we are driving, but in any other setting their performance withers fast. “Paper maps are the superior technology,” says famed Canadian author and explorer Adam Shoalts. “With digital maps, the screen is too small. It’s hard to read in the sun. It doesn’t work when it’s wet.”
Shoalts has spent his life travelling through Canada’s most rugged, untamed wilderness—canoeing the gigantic lakes of the high Arctic, scaling the mountains of Labrador—and has the kind of brash self-assurance you’d expect from a frontiersman. He carries a GPS with him on all his trips, but, as wayfinding tools go, it’s way down his list, after his compass, the position of the sun, the direction of the wind, visual landmarks, his paper maps, and his memory.
“GPS is a two-hands technology when you need your hands for more important things like paddling and eating,” he says. “It’s usually zoomed in too close. You try to zoom out and suddenly you’re looking at all of North America. In the time it takes to get the scale right, you can get blown off-course.” As paddlers know, with a paper map propped up in the canoe, we can just zoom in and out with our eyes.
Most backcountry enthusiasts are not doing Shoalts’ brand of wilderness exploration, but they face similar challenges. Back in 2006, a Toronto paddler by the name of Jeff McMurtrie got lost on an Algonquin Provincial Park canoe trip because the official park map was riddled with errors: campsites in the wrong places, phantom bays, missing portages. “I told park officials about the errors so they could fix them. They never did—their maps are still wrong— so I started making my own.”
Today, he is a full-time cartography entrepreneur. His company, Maps by Jeff, produces maps for Ontario’s major backcountry provincial parks (Algonquin, Temagami, French River, Killarney, Massasauga, and Kawartha Highlands, all of which he has explored many times over), each one replete with vivid, exquisite detail. “My maps are all about answering the questions people have when they plan and navigate a trip,” he says.
McMurtrie’s maps make clever use of technology to answer some of those questions. Each park’s points of entry are marked with a QR code that will link you to Google Maps to plan the drive. McMurtrie’s maps also come in digital form, but they are simply online versions of his paper maps, which are the real deal.
McMurtrie’s maps are a perfect marriage of form and function, getting you excited about your destination while telling you exactly how to get there. Every canoe route is graded by difficulty and includes an expected travel time. Most portages feature a cross-sectional diagram showing their steepness and elevation gain. Rivers show direction of flow. But McMurtrie’s maps also point out where the best swimming holes are, which fish you can catch in which lake, the locations of shipwrecks and abandoned logging cabins, and where the moose hang out.
Smartphone apps and GPS locators, despite the thrall of their infinitely zoomable satellite imagery, don’t provide this tapestry of detail, and they would suck at it if they tried. They’d turn it into a mess of rollovers, drop-down menus, and pop-ups. They’d force you to focus on the screen when you’re finally out in the wild, distracting you from your surroundings with a digital red pin. Some things just aren’t meant to be captured in the palm of your hand.
Few governments bother to hoard GIS information anymore, because there’s no point. Geospatial data now has its own collaborative platform in OpenStreetMap—sometimes called the Wikipedia of maps—which, in the mere 22 years since its founding, has managed to crowdsource a stunningly comprehensive and surprisingly accurate dataset that covers most of the planet. Mapmaking has truly been democratized by technology: anyone of any skill level now has access to the data and the tools they need to make maps, even for places they’ve never set foot in.
But technology’s disruption of cartography has also resulted in one of technology’s most ubiquitous sins—the “enshittification” of information. Coined by Canadian-British author Cory Doctorow, the term describes how the quality of digital platforms erodes over time as useful, quality information gets drowned out by the everincreasing volume of trolls, bots, and spam, and the need to cater to advertisers and shareholders over users.
The story of map-making’s disruption isn’t a perfect fit for Doctorow’s model, but the term resonates with mapmakers. “There are more maps being produced now than ever before, but they’re low effort,” says North Vancouver cartographer Jeff Clark. “Just because the data is available doesn’t mean the maps being produced are correct, or that they’re useful.”
His company, Clark Geomatics, makes maps for a wide variety of clients, including tourism associations, nonprofits, and governments. He has produced beautiful, award-winning regional maps of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest— large-area, small-scale maps of places such as the Salish Sea and the Sea to Sky region, the kind that make great wall hangings of their own because you can look at them for hours, just as you might a work of art.
“There is a lot of free data and free tools out there, but there’s not a lot of skill,” he says. “And that produces what I call zombie maps—it’s an image of a place, but there’s nothing there.”
Think of a typical golf course map, with its cartoonish smattering of greens and fairways, or a buried treasure map with its dotted line and an X to mark the spot—those are zombie maps, and that’s pretty much standard for a great deal of digital mapping. “These maps are all being viewed on small screens, so they just don’t need the same level of design quality,” says Clark. “The designers will put a lake where it’s supposed to be, but they don’t bother to symbolize it with any accuracy. ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s a lake.’ ”
Clark says even government maps aren’t what they used to be. “There’s much less cartographic effort going into official maps anymore,” he says. “They’re using the same styles they used going back to probably the 1990s. It’s all very computer-driven.” In other words, they are updating the geospatial data and nothing else, in an endless digital loop devoid of craft.
Shoalts, from his dual perspective as both explorer and historian (one of his books is titled A History of Canada in Ten Maps), has noticed the difference. “I spend lots of time in map libraries, and I find that old maps from the 1970s or before are superior to anything available today,” he says. “They have a richness of detail that you can’t always find in newer maps.” An old logging road can disappear from a new map, even though it remains a usable feature—especially for an explorer like him.
Shoalts takes those old maps with him on his solo adventures. Perhaps that’s because a map made by a surveyor, or a team of surveyors, inevitably conveys a human point of view. With those maps in hand, he’s not really travelling alone.
After two years of relying on a map app, I finally stowed my phone away and drove back from the cottage using my wits alone. I made it home without incident, but I was constantly double-checking my surroundings and second-guessing myself, fearful of missing a landmark or making a wrong turn.
Navigating that trip was harder than it should have been, and the technology bears some responsibility for that. “Spatial memory” is the scientific term for the cognitive process humans use to navigate. It’s how we store the impressions we make of our surroundings, the names and locations of places and landmarks, the distances between them, and how we orient ourselves. And multiple scientific studies have shown that relying on GPS makes our spatial memory worse, and even hinders our ability to get around without it. The title of a 2020 study from McGill University pretty much sums it up: “Habitual use of GPS negatively impacts spatial memory during self-guided navigation.”
Spatial memory is mostly stored in the hippocampus, located deep inside the brain. Studies have shown that London taxi drivers, who must pass an arduous test, called “the Knowledge,” requiring them to memorize about 25,000 streets and thousands of landmarks just to be licensed, have larger hippocampi than the rest of us. “We’re all habituated to using GPS even when it’s not strictly necessary, and it has an impact on how we see the world,” says Shoalts. I don’t know how big Shoalts’ hippocampus is, and neither does he, but he has the ability to memorize a new map every morning, and there’s no doubt in his mind that his spatial memory has helped keep him alive.
Recreational athletes love to talk about reviving their “muscle memory” when they get back on the golf course or the tennis court after a few months away. In my case, it was about reviving my “memory muscle.” Through disuse, I found it had begun to atrophy, and the potential consequences are frightening. Declining spatial memory is an early warning sign of Alzheimer’s disease, yet taxi and ambulance drivers, with their active hippocampi, have been observed to show lower Alzheimer’s-related death rates. Meanwhile, I just spent two years behind the wheel, Siri in my ear, zoning out, and hastening my own mental demise.
I did not consult a neurologist or a shrink to arrive at this self-assessment. But the published research sure fits my lived experience, and the conclusions are liberating. I’m done putting zombie technology between me and my surroundings, relying on digital maps that confine my horizons to a rolling six-block radius. I’m gonna go get lost and then I’m gonna find my way back. That will make the trip unforgettable.
Award-winning author Philip Preville wrote about the challenges of development planning on Muldrew Lake, Ont., for our Mar/Apr ’25 issue. His favourite map of all time is J.R.R. Tolkien’s Map of Middle-earth.
This story originally appeared in our Spring ’26 issue.
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