Every career is a map.
Mine runs from the Driftless Hills of Wisconsin to the Sierra Nevada: map libraries, black bears, wildfires, and twenty years of making geography legible. Scroll to travel it.
The Driftless Hills
The early years
I grew up in Spring Green, in Wisconsin's Driftless Region: a landscape the glaciers missed, all ridges, coulees, and the wide Wisconsin River. Frank Lloyd Wright built Taliesin here. The land taught me to read terrain long before I knew the word cartography.
White Gloves & Flight Charts
2005 – 2010 · UW–Milwaukee
A sophomore-year visit to the American Geographical Society Library turned into a job filing maps and cataloging geospatial data, and eventually wearing white gloves to scan Charles Lindbergh's original flight charts. I was hooked. I left with a B.S. in Geography–GIS.
First GIS Job
2007 – 2010 · City of New Berlin
City planning work: parcels, zoning, easements, and the city's first stormwater and sanitary sewer GIS dataset, built from field GPS collection and COGO'd legal descriptions. Unglamorous, foundational, formative.
Tracking Black Bears
2008 – 2011 · National Park Service
West to the Sierra. I tracked black bears with GPS collars, modeled female foraging ranges with kernel density estimation, and hauled gear into the backcountry for frog restoration surveys. The mountains never let go after this.
Arriving at Tahoe
2011 – 2014 · USFS Lake Tahoe Basin
GIS support for forest projects across the basin: mapping Western pearlshell mussels for the Upper Truckee River restoration, generating LiDAR terrain derivatives for habitat modeling, and training Forest Service staff. Tahoe started to feel like home.
The King Fire
2014 – 2016 · US Forest Service
Enterprise geodatabase work for the forest, then the 2014 King Fire: GIS lead for the Burned Area Emergency Rehabilitation team, mapping critical infrastructure and landslide risk from burn severity data while the ground was still warm.
TRPA
2016 – Present · Tahoe Regional Planning Agency
Building the agency's full enterprise GIS: federated ArcGIS Enterprise, automated parcel pipelines, and the public-facing tools on this site, from the Climate Resilience Dashboard to permit review. Science to policy, for the lake.
Back to School, Remotely
2020 · UW–Madison
An M.S. in Cartography, GIS & Web Map Programming, earned online from Tahoe. The program sharpened everything: Python, cartographic theory, open source web mapping, spatial databases. Pages like this one are a direct result.
Blue Basin
2022 – Present · Blue Basin Cartography
The studio is named for home: Lake Tahoe, the blue basin at the center of this map since 2011. Blue Basin Cartography is where the craft side lives, custom print and web cartography, from the Driftless map series back in Wisconsin to the lake outside the window.
bluebasincartography.comWisconsin to the Sierra
Two decades, nine places, one through-line: making geography legible. The next chapters get drawn from South Lake Tahoe.