I'm a GIS professional with two decades of experience across urban planning, natural resource management, and environmental agencies — currently focused on enterprise GIS, web mapping, and building my own cartography studio.
By day I'm the GIS Analyst & Developer at the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency (TRPA), where I manage our ArcGIS Enterprise deployment and build the web mapping applications and data services that the agency depends on. I've been at TRPA since 2016 and plan to stay for the long haul — there's genuinely important work to do for the Tahoe basin.
On the side I run Blue Basin Cartography, a custom map design and cartography studio. I make maps for clients who need to communicate place and data in a visually compelling way — from print maps and illustrated cartography to interactive web maps.
Away from the screen I'm outside — hiking, biking, and exploring the Sierra Nevada with my wife and dog. I'm a native Wisconsinite from Spring Green, WI, but South Lake Tahoe, CA has been home for a while now.
I discovered GIS during my sophomore year at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee while visiting the American Geographical Society Library. I secured a position there filing maps, cataloging geospatial data, and eventually wearing white gloves to scan Charles Lindbergh's original flight charts. I was hooked.
From there I moved through a range of GIS roles — city planning at the City of New Berlin, tracking black bear home ranges at Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks, supporting forest health and wildfire response at the El Dorado National Forest, and finally landing at TRPA in 2016, where I've built out the agency's full enterprise GIS capability.
I hold a Bachelor of Science in Geography–GIS from UW–Milwaukee and a Master of Science in Cartography, GIS, and Web Map Programming from the University of Wisconsin–Madison (2020). The graduate program pushed me to the next level — deepening my Python skills, cartographic theory, open source web mapping, and spatial database design.
Blue Basin Cartography
Custom map design & cartography studioBlue Basin Cartography is my independent studio for custom map design and cartographic production. Whether it's a detailed print map, a styled web basemap, or a data visualization, the goal is always the same: make geography legible and beautiful.
The name comes from the Blue Basin, a striking badlands formation in the John Day Fossil Beds of eastern Oregon — a place that captures everything I love about maps: color, terrain, and geological story.
Visit bluebasincartography.comA few of the places that shaped a career in GIS and cartography.