Pete Kennedy fell in love with Pisgah National Forest in high school and has since channeled his passion for the outdoors into making analog maps for our digital times.
Story by Graham Averill | Photos by GROWL
January 3, 2023
Pete Kennedy can’t ride his bike for more than a few minutes without pulling out his GPS. It’s not that he’s lost; we’re riding a new system of trails just outside the small manufacturing town of Old Fort, North Carolina, and Kennedy knows exactly where he is. He’s ridden this area before. Today he’s collecting data — trail intersections, phantom dirt roads that disappear into the forest, gates separating one section of forest from another. So when we’re riding a gravel road one rainy morning through the Grandfather Ranger District of Pisgah National Forest and Kennedy sees a gate that he’s never noticed before, he pulls out his GPS and adds a waypoint and note.
“The first step to making a map is collecting data,” Kennedy says, typing away on his phone. “Most of that data is collected on the computer, getting info from land managers, poring over blogs and records. But you also need to spend time on the ground and see some things for yourself.”
Kennedy owns Pisgah Map Company, which makes trail maps for hikers, bikers, hunters, and anyone else who wants to explore one of the national forests or recreation areas in Western North Carolina. An important detail: Kennedy makes paper maps, the kind that fold and get pulled out at trail intersections when hikers get turned around. The kind your parents or grandparents had stuffed in their glove compartment. The kind that you might think wouldn’t exist at all anymore, considering we all walk around with tiny supercomputers in our pockets. You could argue that we’re surrounded by more maps today than ever before, but they’ve shapeshifted into the tiny, digital maps that populate our phones and tell us where to find the closest latte, or how to avoid that annoying traffic jam. With satellites beaming the breadth of human knowledge to our smartphones in an instant, it would seem the paper map would be heading the way of other relics like the rotary phone or fax machine. And yet here’s Kennedy, stalking the woods near his home in Asheville, North Carolina, using those satellites and the digital world to feed his decidedly analog product.
“I’ve been worrying about the app world ever since I made my first map more than a decade ago,” Kennedy says. “Is mapmaking even a viable business? Are people done with paper maps?”
He leaves the question hanging out there with no definitive answer, but his success in the space seems to be answer enough. Kennedy has been making paper maps commercially since 2009. His first map was of the Pisgah Ranger District, an extremely popular section of Pisgah National Forest between Asheville and Brevard, North Carolina, that sees millions of hikers and mountain bikers every year. And a lot of those visitors buy his map, which is carried at local bike shops and outfitters. Since releasing the original Pisgah Ranger District map, Kennedy has added nine more maps of areas in Western North Carolina, where a collection of public lands has turned the mountainous corner of the state into a veritable playground for adventurers. Kennedy has rendered much of that area into 25.75-by-38-inch rectangles, from popular parks like Dupont State Recreational Forest to lesser-known gems like the Green River Game Land.
People will still buy a paper map so long as it’s a good paper map. And that’s where Kennedy saw an opportunity with Pisgah Map Company, which was designed with a single purpose: to build a better map.
Pete Kennedy founded Pisgah Map Company in 2009 and has made 10 maps, including one for cyclists, of areas in Western North Carolina. Now an avid mountain biker and kayaker, Kennedy grew up exploring the outdoors and fell in love with Pisgah National Forest when he moved to Asheville as a sophomore in high school.
If you’ve spent any time in a national park or national forest, you’ve probably come across National Geographic’s Trails Illustrated Topographic Maps. The busy, bright yellow maps are as iconic as Smokey the Bear and distributed all over the U.S. There’s probably a Nat Geo map for your favorite park. You might even have one in your backpacking bin or garage. And they’re perfectly fine. Not perfect, but fine. The way a midsize off-brand sedan is fine. It will get you from point A to point B most of the time. But there are errors — trails that are marked wrong, gravel roads that appear in some editions but not in others. With some maps, like the Nat Geo map for Pisgah Ranger District, there are design flaws, like how the layout seems to prioritize roads and towns over trails and splits the most popular trails in half so you have to flip the map over to follow a path from beginning to end. Most people would use it and never give it a second thought, but Kennedy, an avid mountain biker and kayaker, knew he could do a better job.
“It was a love for the outdoors, and a love for the area,” Kennedy says of his first desire to map Pisgah. “Being able to see the places that I love is a big thing for me. When I open up a map, this sense of adventure just swells up inside of me. Just looking at a map gets me excited about exploring. Everywhere I go, I buy a map. I get excited just looking at them.”
Kennedy speaks with an accent that’s hard to place — a Southern drawl mixed with a bit of California surfer bro. He’s 51, small-framed and with graying hair, and has the unbridled energy of a bee buzzing around a flower.
“I have a busy brain,” Kennedy says. “Out here in the woods, it’s the one place where my brain calms down, especially if I’m kayaking or mountain biking or climbing. You have to focus and be in the moment. It’s wonderful.”
Kennedy didn’t grow up with that same dedication to the outdoors. He had a typical ’80s childhood living in Hartsville, South Carolina. His family spent a lot of time at the lake, fishing and water skiing, and he roamed the woods of his neighborhood with his older brother. But he didn’t fall in love with these adventurous pursuits that now define his life until he was a sophomore in high school. That’s when he moved to Asheville to attend boarding school and discovered Pisgah National Forest, not far from the city limits.
“I went on a backpacking trip to Linville Gorge, which is this canyon full of rock and whitewater in the Grandfather [Ranger] District of Pisgah,” Kennedy says. “It was so wild, and I was hooked.”
He spent the next few decades oscillating through various adventurous obsessions — learning how to climb, and then spending all his free time at classic Southern crags like Looking Glass Rock and Rumbling Bald. Then he focused on mountain biking and pedaled Pisgah’s signature singletrack. For several years, he dedicated himself to kayaking, building his skills so he could run Class V water like the Green River, not far from Asheville.
Now, Kennedy has 8-year-old twins; a day job teaching GIS (Geographic Information Systems), the computer aspect of mapping data, at Asheville-Buncombe Technical Community College; and a yard and garage full of outdoor gear: kayaks, canoes, a camping trailer, and bikes. He spends most of his free time mountain biking and kayaking these days, making the most of the ever-expanding trail system that surrounds his home in Asheville. He’s teaching his kids how to ski, paddle, and bike. And he’s using that passion for the outdoors to give his maps an edge over the competition.
Not only does Kennedy use his personal knowledge to refine the data he delivers through his topographic maps, but he also goes a step further and offers a handful of suggested rides or hikes for each map. Flip his Dupont State Forest map over, for instance, and details on beginner bike rides, epic singletrack missions, and standout waterfalls appear — like a local friend telling you his favorite spots in the forest.
“Our local knowledge sets us apart from the other maps out there,” Kennedy says. While a lot of mapping can happen on the computer nowadays, Kennedy and Jack Henderson, a mapmaker who’s worked for him off and on for the last seven years, spend a lot of time on the ground looking for holes in the data. “Anytime there’s a gap, we get out into the field and ground-truth the data.”
“Our local knowledge sets us apart from other maps out there,” Kennedy says. While a lot of mapping can happen on the computer nowadays, Kennedy and Jack Henderson “get out into the field and ground-truth the data.”
And the “ground-truthing” isn’t over once a map is complete. Kennedy updates all his maps yearly, adding small changes and tweaks based on new information, trail work, and design nuances. An example: There’s been a flurry of trail work in the Grandfather Ranger District over the last year, all of which will be reflected in Pisgah Map’s new Grandfather map. Similarly, the Pisgah Ranger District’s trail system is always shifting because of reroutes, trail additions, and closures — all of which need to be vetted by Kennedy and Henderson, and then reflected in the map’s latest edition. Over the years, Kennedy has been on most of the trails in Pisgah National Forest and made hundreds of changes to that particular map alone. He traversed every trail in Dupont State Recreational Forest when he first created a map for that popular area. And that’s just the hard data, the nuts and bolts that form the guts of the map. Kennedy is also constantly tweaking the design of the maps and how he conveys information to his users.
“Font size keeps me up at night,” Kennedy says. “A lot of little things like that keep me up at night. You’re communicating a lot of information to someone at one time. It’s not like a book, where the information is doled out a page at a time. You open this map and you see it all at once. So, I’m constantly obsessing over the hierarchy of information. What does the user see first? What’s the most important information I need to convey? You don’t want people to have to dig around for info, but you also don’t want to be overwhelmed with info they don’t need.”
The first thing you notice about a Pisgah Map Company map is how pretty it is, especially if it’s sitting next to a Nat Geo Trails Illustrated map. Kennedy spends a lot of time thinking about color palettes, and the covers of his maps are a soothing blend of soft blues, greens, and the occasional orange hue. Instead of a photograph, Kennedy opts for hand-sketched scenes designed by Jim Slatton on the covers, which gives the maps a retro, national park poster vibe. The soft color palette is carried over to the interior, where colorful lines indicating trails and roads sprawl through shades of green and tan and blue, indicating different land ownership designations and bodies of water. Every decision Kennedy makes — the font and size of the lettering, the particular shade of green for public land, the subtlety of the topographic lines — contributes to an overall aesthetic that is as soothing as it is informative.
In Kennedy’s hands, a map isn’t just information. It’s art.
“Cartography occupies this weird space that blends science and art,” Kennedy says. “A lot of science goes into making them, but to me maps are beautiful. A well-designed map is absolutely a work of art.”
His customers agree; Kennedy has started making large-format prints of his maps on aluminum composite panels that are made to be hung on the wall, like a piece of art. They’re so popular, he has a hard time keeping up with demand. Meanwhile, he’s forging ahead with more maps. He’s releasing a new map this fall of Hickory Nut Gorge, a wide canyon east of Asheville that includes a patchwork of state park and private conservancy land. Lake Lure sits at the heart of the gorge and has always attracted visitors (the 1987 film “Dirty Dancing” was filmed in part at the lake), but the creation of a new state park and the acquisition of privately conserved land has increased the traffic the gorge sees. Trail-building efforts have blossomed throughout the gorge, and there’s an imminent need for a map as more and more bikers and hikers descend on the area.
For all the work Kennedy puts into his maps, he doesn’t like taking credit for them. Other than the original Pisgah Ranger District map, Kennedy’s name doesn’t appear on any of his maps. Even the company’s logo is striking yet nondescript.
“I don’t really like the attention,” Kennedy says, but he does like to see people using his maps out in the forest. That notion of making something tangible that someone can use is satisfying for him. “I give away a lot of maps when I’m in the forest and see someone who needs some guidance. I have such a strong affinity for this landscape, and maybe that map in their hands can help them build a greater connection to that land. Just like it does for me.”
Graham Averill is a freelance writer living in the Southern Appalachians. He writes about adventure, parenthood, culture, and making mistakes for a variety of magazines.
GROWL is the photo duo of Justin Weaver and Chris McClure. Together they make photographs, portraits, product shots, and adventure and documentary narratives that make people smile and wonder.
