The original idea was to make a series of maps to illustrate the background of chapter pages in the poetry anthology, The Enpipe Line: 70,000+ kilometres of poetry written in resistance to the Enbridge Northern Gateway Pipelines proposal.

It became clear early on, however, that the most versatile solution would be to make a single wide (but not very tall) map of the entire pipeline route, and let the publisher select portions of it to illustrate pages as needed. The pipeline route itself, she requested, would not be on the map, but she would like, she said to my surprise, contours.

The map, whose final scale was going to be close to 1:1,000,000, was made in QGIS. Aside from the rivers, lakes, roads and towns (for which I used the 1:2,000,000 scale data downloadable from here), the main feature was the contours. I created these, at 200 m intervals, from the 250K DEMs for all the relevent topo maps sheets the map crossed, using GDAL tools in QGIS. (Download DEM files from GeoBase.) River labels were added in Inkscape.

view entire map as JPG image (7.2MB)

Projection is the custom Albers Equal Area projection that the province of BC uses: standard parallels 50° and 58.5°, central longitude of -126°.