#29 – Anna Riling

#29 – Anna Riling

April 20th, 2026

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Angus Stocking (00:19.778)
This is Everything Is Somewhere. I’m Angus Stocking. My guest today is Anna Riling, a cartographer in Durango, Colorado, which is near to me, and one reason I was looking forward to speaking with her. She’s also owner of Four Corners Mapping, an award-winning cartography business. Anna Riling, welcome to Everything Is Somewhere.

Anna Riling (00:44.770)
Thank you. Thank you for having me.

Angus (00:47.438)
All right, well, it’s a pleasure. We’ve been working on this interview for a while. I find cartography generally, and a nearby Western business, super fascinating. Could you maybe tell us a bit about how you got into cartography and why that was the career for you, and what your business is like at this point?

Anna (01:11.352)
Sure. I did a few odd jobs out of college, worked in restaurants and on ambulance first response, and thought I was going to be a firefighter. And I ended up going into geology, which is what I got my bachelor’s in. And I worked as a geologist for 20 years or so in varying fields. I started in geotechnical engineering and then moved into mud logging. So I worked on drill rigs for a while in the San Juan Basin and then got into environmental consulting and did GIS. At that time, I had my professional geologist license and I was finding myself doing a lot of jobs and filling a lot of roles that I wasn’t that excited about.

Black Mesa map

Anna (10:19.842)
We could start with the one that you inquired about, the Black Mesa map. Is that the one that you were thinking of? So this was a map that I made for a Diné nonprofit organization called To Nizhoni Ani, which means—what does it mean?—“sacred water,” I think, or “water speaks.” And they’re based on Black Mesa.

They contacted me because they work on issues around the availability of water in the twilight of the coal mines up there. So I don’t know if you’ve ever driven from Durango to Flagstaff, but when you drove past Kayenta, there was a conveyor belt of coal to a tower and there was a railroad that went to the power plant in Page. That conveyor belt, that whole operation, is no more. The conveyor belt is gone. The train doesn’t run anymore and the coal mining has been shut down. But that doesn’t mean that there haven’t been detrimental effects on the water quality and availability. And they wanted a way to tell that story that was tangible and relatable and a way that they could distribute easily on Black Mesa.

And Black Mesa, if you’re not familiar, is a big escarpment, a plateau directly in the middle of the Navajo Nation in northeastern Arizona. And it’s actually the Hopi reservation too. The Hopi reservation is inside the Navajo Nation. And so there are definitely issues with lack of access and infrastructure, and even houses without power and that kind of thing. There’s literally no map of Black Mesa for getting around that shows accurately all the roads.

Angus (12:34.478)
Really, that seems incredible in a way.

Anna (12:38.638)
Yeah. Well, there’s no map that’s used widely on the rez and really relied upon, I guess.

Angus (12:46.030)
I believe you, it just seems strange.

Anna (12:48.430)
So they wanted—there were a couple of different asks here. One was a reference tool and one was this storytelling tool. And so when I dug into the data, there were several authoritative sources of, for instance, water‑well data. And some agreed and some were disparate and it was hard to parse out what was actually really there, what might have been there at one time but was no longer there as far as, like, a windmill or a water source. That was a challenge, because they had originally wanted to show windmills on this map, because windmills are important culturally and just as a resource for livestock and for domestic water supply.

And it was next to impossible to pull out that pump type as an attribute in a lot of the data because it just was incomplete. And so we just had a lot of conversations back and forth about it, and we decided to represent the disappearance of these and the discrepancy and the lack of modern records of this very important data by not showing them, and instead telling a story through these text blocks and through the imagery of the windmill.

And so then the other things that you’ll see on there are the boundary of the N‑aquifer. That’s the aquifer that is used by the people on Black Mesa and that was used by the Peabody coal mines for their water source. So it’s a very important boundary. You’ll also see the chapter houses and the chapter boundaries. Those are administrative, governmental divisions on the rez.

What was interesting—at least to me—was that the roads are sort of the same shape problem as the wells. There were a lot of different sources, from the census to the DOT to OpenStreetMap, that might show a road when it wasn’t there or might show it as paved when it was unpaved. So there was a lot of back and forth, doing real‑time editing on these roads to accurately portray where they went.

Anna (15:14.458)
Because people are going to be using this map—do use this map. It is up in every single chapter house on Black Mesa right now.

Angus (15:22.850)
Was there a component here—were you doing some locating of windmills, for example?

Anna (15:32.502)
No, I wish. I mean, I’ve been up there a bunch. I used to work up there when I was working for Western Technologies doing geotechnical engineering, because the BIA was then building a bunch of houses and they needed to get the soil samples from the substrate. So I did travel all over Black Mesa, but not for this project.

Angus (15:51.118)
And then you mentioned the text blocks, which is interesting to me. You were doing a fair amount of writing and storytelling, I guess, with this. There was a literary aspect to it. Is that usual, or was that for this project alone? To what extent are you incorporating text and narrative into the maps you do?

Anna (16:22.926)
It depends on the map. Like I said, the text sort of enhances and somewhat replaces the data that we weren’t able to actually show. And a map—I think if you can show it visually, great, that’s what a map is for, right? To show where things are. But I also think that an interpretive aspect really lends itself to this kind of map.

Because this is a large‑format map. This is a 36 by 48, I think, so it’s very big. People are going to be standing there looking at it and really diving in. I think that it really depends on the map. There is a lot of white space on this map, and so if I didn’t fill it with text boxes, I would have had to figure out something else.

Angus (17:12.589)
Yeah, well, and that brings up another—this is a beautiful map to look at. It’s sort of a subtle color scheme and it’s not exactly an aerial map, but it’s got photo. How much effort do you put into making your cartography beautiful as well as functional?

Anna (17:39.926)
That is my end goal and reason for being. Yeah, probably too much, you know. This map was…

Angus (17:45.131)
Quite a bit.

Anna (17:53.312)
I just had a vision and I knew how important it was going to be and I wanted it to be the best it could be. And so I really poured myself into it. And also I’m from Arizona and I’ve traveled this area a bunch and I love the terrain and the landscape and I have deep respect for it and for the people who live there. And I really wanted to convey that sense of place—that gets so overused—but that sense of kinship and respect for, and reverence for, this very, very cool, unique landscape.

So you mentioned the aerial; it actually is a Landsat photo that I blended with shaded relief to really bring out the details of the canyons and to represent, without being overwhelming, that the northeast edge of Black Mesa is actually forested and grades into desert as you go towards the highway.

Angus (18:53.570)
Well, it’s beautiful. Thank you for sharing this. How long has it been out in the world and what kind of feedback do you hear?

Anna (19:01.742)
Oh, what’s the date on it? I finished it last year. And it won Best Layout at the Esri User Conference last year, in 2025, which was a surprise to me because I didn’t even know they were handing out awards. I got notified by a bunch of people on LinkedIn.

Angus (19:21.934)
You didn’t apply, they just let you know.

Anna (19:24.718)
Yeah. And it’s also featured on maps.com, which has Esri’s sort of showcase of maps that they like. And, yeah, this is one of my favorite maps I’ve ever made. I really think it came together well. I spent way too much time on it. I learned a lot making this map, and that’s really fun.

A lot of the elements, like the colors, I derived—that’s an interesting aside—the palette for this map. I picked colors from an image of Nicole Horseherder, the executive director of To Nizhoni Ani. It’s her standing at her property on Black Mesa at sunset, and the colors are orange and rose and sage and dusty blue. So that’s how I got the palette for the map.

Angus (20:36.583)
It is really awesome to hear you speak with an artist’s language about the very functional work you do. Congratulations, you’re right. It’s a very beautiful map and I can tell that it’s useful to the people. Who commissioned this? Who was the client on this one?

Anna (21:01.048)
To Nizhoni Ani—“sacred water” is what that means in Diné, in Navajo. And the executive director’s name is Nicole Horseherder, not Sheepherder.

Angus (21:13.902)
For sure.

Anna (21:15.182)
Cool. And I can share that photo with you too. It’s a beautiful photo.

Angus (21:18.658)
Yeah, please, thank you. We’ll get that up on screen. And just so listeners know, this is one of our first recorded video podcasts. And so I hope you’re watching that, but we’re also making an effort to be interesting in audio.

And then you’ve got—you’ve loaded up one more map for us to look at on the American Rivers. Can we take a look at that?

American Rivers – California region map

Anna (21:47.200)
Yeah, so this one was done recently for American Rivers for the California region. What they wanted was a template to use for—so they have, I think, nine different regions throughout the country where each region has their own body of work that they focus on, and having regions allows them to have local authorities working on initiatives. And so they wanted a template to be able to apply to each of those regions so that when you saw it, you could recognize it immediately as an American Rivers region map.

And so they started with California, which was just epic. I think there were—I don’t even remember how many rivers, 50 at least—rivers that I needed to map and label. And then there are all of these project points. So it represents all the projects they do and the types of projects, from floodplain restoration, conservation partnership, et cetera. And where there’s overlapping projects, you don’t want overlapping points. So I did the larger point with the number in it to represent multiple projects concurrently.

They also wanted to convey the potential for, if there were species of importance in these areas. Initially they had talked about images, and this is an eight‑and‑a‑half by eleven, this is a letter‑size, panned‑out map. Having a bunch of images of, like, a beaver and a salmon and a Swainson’s hawk on this type of product just wasn’t going to work. So I went this route of these fun icons that were open source. I got them from phylopic.com, I think it’s called, and they have species silhouettes that I modified to some extent. I built that one in the bottom with the community, the rural community.

Angus (23:55.128)
The people joining hands there.

Anna (23:58.956)
Yeah. So there was a lot of thought that went into this map. Believe it or not, there was a lot to cram in there and it needed to not look crammed in.

Angus (24:08.390)
I believe it. Yeah.

Angus (24:13.154)
You know what stands out, just as the trees sort of stood out for me on the Nordic map, this lettering seems very effectively done. Could you talk with us a bit about labeling a map and what your lettering is, your fonts? You think about it quite a bit. What went into this one?

Anna (24:42.586)
So American Rivers has an established branding kit and I’ve worked with them a lot, so I’m pretty used to working with their palette and their fonts. They have specific fonts they use for specific applications. So that’s where the fonts came from, and I had some license with sizing and whether it was italic or bolded or colored or that kind of thing.

And I think that the left justification of the text boxes on the right side of California and the right justification of the text boxes on the left side, west side, of California—I think that things like that really make it cohesive. If they were sort of random or if maybe they were centered, it just wouldn’t work as well. I think it draws your eye: you start with Eagle Lake and then you go on down to each of those text boxes. Maybe; I don’t know. That’s what I do.

Angus (25:43.342)
I’m a font nerd and typography nerd, and I love that detail. Now that I notice it—or you pointed it out—you’re correct, it really works. And by the way, I need to send you, I’ve got Tufte’s books and they’re kind of spendy and I don’t use them at all, but you would really appreciate them. I’ll get your address and I’ll put a care package in the mail. Your mindset is much like his and I think you should know about Edward Tufte.

Anna (26:16.536)
Thanks.

Future of cartography and Anna’s work

Angus (26:29.738)
This has been superb. Maybe we could close: what’s the future like for cartography and your business in particular? Do you have some goals or ambitions out there? Is there a type of map you would really like to do that you haven’t had a chance yet? What’s a big reach for a cartographer?

Anna (26:51.778)
Well…

Anna (26:55.655)
It’s funny that you ask because I feel the change coming on in my work and my direction. I really, really enjoy making maps. And lately I’ve been making some more creative and artistic maps, abstract maps even. I’m really drawn to that, but it’s very hard to make a living doing that, you know?

So those are just side gigs while my clients pay me to do their maps. I do hope that I can do more artistic maps. An example is the one you’ve probably seen on my website, the Colorado River Basin names map. That one is a map of all of the rivers in the Colorado River Basin represented only by spline‑like labels, by their names along their length. Instead of a line, it’s just their label.

I did that for the 30‑day map challenge last November, which is a really dorky LinkedIn map challenge where you make a different map every day of November based on a different prompt. And I made that one and people said, “I’d buy that.” So I cleaned it up and now it’s for sale on my website.

Angus (28:28.942)
Congratulations.

Anna (28:29.752)
But it’s really hard to—like I said, you’d have to get really into social media and documenting your workflow visually with video and audio and narration. I think that would be a huge component of that kind of work.

Angus (28:46.606)
Is there a scope for something like magazine illustration, graphic design? Would you be interested in that? And are there clients for something like that?

Anna (29:00.492)
Yeah, potentially. I feel like I’m just really in the incipient stages of even thinking about doing anything like that. I have a lot of work on my plate right now and it’s kind of hard to make those kinds of inquiries if you’re just pretty busy. Yeah.

AI and cartography

Angus (29:22.668)
Yeah. And as a kind of a final question, I interview a lot of engineers and tech people and land surveyors in my trade as a freelance writer. And I’ve been posing the question, how is AI affecting your work? Artists have been thinking this too. Is there any encroachment on your trade from AI‑produced maps? Are you worried about it or are you using AI? What’s your strategy with this big change that is coming on the world?

Anna (30:05.450)
Yeah, I think you could use AI to do certain aspects of a map, but I don’t know if you’ve ever told ChatGPT to make you a map. It’s pretty funny what it comes up with. It’s pretty far away, but there’s definitely potential there.

I use AI tools a lot. I used ChatGPT a lot today to help me with some Arcade expressions for a web map I’m building. That’s extremely helpful, things like that. In the cartography sphere, I saw a map of, I think, North American fauna or something. All of the images were these really cool, colored‑pencil‑style illustrations, sort of like a National Geographic‑style illustration, all generated—full disclosure by the mapmaker—with AI, and these images just sort of transposed on the map.

So I don’t know if I’m the authoritative source to answer that question. I’m clearly a little wary of using it for graphics. I like to design things myself with my own brain.

Angus (31:24.780)
I don’t know that anyone has a clear answer. You’re using it for some things but not others. I’m with you. Thank you for addressing that question. It’s a bit on my mind because it’s obviously—writing is imperiled, almost, in the public mind, by AI. And land surveyors—things as simple as legal descriptions. I’m starting to think people will think about how to apply AI to legal descriptions and deed descriptions. So, interesting world.

Anna (32:07.758)
That feature just came out in Pro—to be able to have a legal description generated from spatial data.

Angus (32:19.318)
Yeah, and that’s like a big income source for land surveying. And so you can see there’d be some anxiety there. Anna, thank you so much for talking with us about your trade and congratulations on an interesting lifestyle choice. You’re just back from a trip through Grand Canyon, right?

Anna (32:43.650)
Right. I was in Grand Canyon for a month on a river trip, actually with a client of mine. I should talk about this. He’s writing a book about the waterfalls of the Grand Canyon and I’m doing the maps for that book. So that is a great example of an artistic outlet for me, where it’s definitely cartography but it’s also—like, I can definitely apply an artistic style.

But yeah, he invited me on that trip and ostensibly it was a work trip because we were taking photographs of the waterfalls. Yeah.

Angus (33:22.944)
Amazing. Thank you so much.