Notes on the making of this atlas
California Sketch Atlas sketches California's 58 counties in seven regions and describes the parks and landforms inside them. Here is what went into it, and how much weight it can bear.
Title block
A browsing atlas for people who want the shape of the state in their heads: a student working through the county list, someone placing a town they keep hearing about, or a reader who wants a little background on a park before going to its official visitor pages. It assumes no knowledge of California at all.
Drawn, not surveyed
Every map, and the logo, is a drawing written directly as SVG code for this site. The outlines began as a few hundred rough longitude and latitude points typed in by hand and were then drawn with a pen line that wobbles on purpose. Nothing was traced from an existing map, and no photograph, stock picture or image generator was involved. County seats and landmarks were set down by eye.
These maps are not to scale and not for navigation. Use them to see roughly where things sit, never to find your way.
The seven regions are the atlas's own way of dividing the counties into readable chapters. The state recognises no such division.
Sources in the margin
County seats come from the California Secretary of State. Area and population come from the US Census Bureau, volcanoes and the Central Valley from the US Geological Survey, national park sites from the National Park Service, and state parks from California State Parks, with one item from the California State Capitol Museum. Each region page lists the documents it used.
Who drafted the words
An AI system planned and drafted the text from those documents, and the same system wrote the map drawings as code. No independent human editor has reviewed the text yet. Until someone does, the documents named on each page are the authority, and the atlas is a place to start rather than to finish.
A script checked most of those documents for the facts the atlas takes from them. The California State Parks website could not be reached, though, so the state park descriptions were never checked that way; the editorial policy explains the gap.
Not a trip planner
Road conditions, closures, fees and permits change all the time, and the atlas does not track them or advise on them. Before any trip, ask the agency that runs the place. Nothing here is for sale either: no bookings, tours, hotels or businesses, no advertising, sponsorship or affiliate links, and no cookies or analytics.
Answerable to no agency
The atlas is independent. The State of California, its counties, the National Park Service, California State Parks and every other agency it cites have no hand in it and have not endorsed it. An earlier, unrelated website used this domain in past years; the atlas shares nothing with it.
No return address
There is no contact route yet, and so no form, email address or phone number to use. Nobody goes back over the documents on a schedule either, so a mistake may sit unnoticed; the agencies' own current pages are the ones to trust.