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How We Got Started

How We Make Our Maps

Who's Who

We got into map publishing almost by accident. In 1989, we opened Map Town, a retail map and travel book store, in downtown Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Soon we were deluged by requests for up-to-date toppographic maps of Kananaskis Country, a popular recreational area for Calgarians on the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rockies. So, in 1992, we responded with two manually-drafted 1:50 000-scale maps - the Spray Lakes and Kananaskis Lakes maps, both of which are now collectors' items.

From there, we expanded our coverage of topographic maps of the Canadian Rockies to include Lake Louise, Banff, Jasper, Yoho and Kootenay National Park.
Concurrently with our recreational maps, we have developed four touring maps that roughly cover southern Alberta and B.C., extending west to Vancouver Island, B.C., south to Northern Washington, USA, and north to Edmonton, Alberta.

To date, we have 22 maps on our product list.

We do everything on computer. After we've selected the area we want, we start in AutoCad, digitizing the roads, drainage, contour lines and so on, all on different layers. We supplement that with air photos, lots of on-the-ground research including GPSing of the trails, as well as extensive consultation with Parks people in the national parks and in Kananaskis Country.

Donna Nelson

Donna heads up our operations in Victoria.
She does all of the production work, up-dates the website (not as often as she should), and handles the rest of the day-to-day running of the office. She is very knowledgeable about the parks and likes to spend her weekends hiking.
Donna is co-owner of Gem Trek Publishing with her husband, Roger.

Roger Nelson

Roger founded Gem Trek Publishing.
As technical support consultant, Roger works out the kinks in the digital map-making, keeping Donna from getting too many grey hairs. When he isn't coming up with leading-edge ideas, he enjoys finding new adventure sports to fill his leisure time.