So, when it comes to maps I feel very comfortable. My dad was a land surveyor and I have had an interest in maps for a long time so I felt like this SLO would be no big deal. I was correct, the topographic maps and geological maps were relatively easy to understand. So, for this SLO I decided to get out and take a hike to see where my topography skills are at.

So, when I first got out to the lake I started work on my map. Obviously, you don't indicate things like mountains and hills on a topography map because that should be show through the contour lines. However, I just wanted to make it clear that was indeed what I was going for in the drawing of my map. After that first introduction I began my hike down the mountain.

Halfway down the hill and I show how difficult the walk down has been up to this point, the grade is pretty steep, so we are going to see tight contour lines on our map to signify the steepness of the hill.

We've hit the bottom of our path and as we can see by the map that I show, things stayed steep on our trail, but they are starting to flatten out as you can tell by the contour lines becoming less tight.

So,in this video I show that we have completed our journey and made a sufficient topographic map to go along with it. As you can tell by my very poor drawing of Silverwood, the lake sits in the center of very hilly terrain. We can tell this because the contour lines around the lake are close together and compact which shows us that it's going to be steep.