Mike Hermann's Purple Lizard maps are well-known to the hiking and biking community in the State College area. If you frequent the forests of Rothrock, most likely you already have a copy.

Mike, who now lives in Maine and works for the University of Maine, is a busy award-winning cartographer. His most recent project, a collaborative effort with the University of Maine's Climate Change Institute on a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF), won a top award in the nation’s premier map design competition. The American Congress on Surveying & Mapping (ACSM-- a Maryland-based non-profit educational organization created in 1941 to advance surveying, mapping and related fields) gave its Best of Category award in the contest’s Recreational/Travel Map Professional Division to "Maine’s Ice Age Trail Down East Map and Guide." Hermann has submitted map work to the ACSM on several previous occasions and has won Honorable Mention 1997 and 2004.

Hermann (B.S. 1995) is Senior Cartographer for the Canadian-American Center at the University of Maine in Orono. Mike and his colleagues recently unveiled "Maine's Ice Age Trail Map." It is what it sounds like; a visitor's guide to the days when Maine was covered by giant ice sheets. The map and guide provides drivers with information on 46 geologic stops ranging from Acadia National Park in the south to Calais in the north. For each stop, a detailed description is given to explain how the ice sheets transformed the landscape into what the visitor sees today.

For example, if you were on the tour, you would eventually arrive at Stop 26, near Columbia Falls. Upon arriving, you would encounter a wave-cut terrace that was formed along a glacier's edge. The terrace, roughly 3 miles from the current coastline, was formed when sea level was 230 feet higher than the present level. As the water retreated, ridges, scarps, and terraces were left behind. This is what you'd see. Descriptions help describe what the visitor sees while providing a brief explanation of why they see it. The map on the reverse side provides a history of the Maine Ice Age as well as a thematic depiction of types of glacial deposition (swamp, marine sand, till, etc.).

Former Penn State Geography student, Michael Mannion (B.S. 1995), helped Hermann with the GIS work for the Ice Age Trail. Mannion is founder and sole member of Mannion Geosystems, LLC. According to Hermann, Michael "resolved our registration issues with the state's geology data which, when overlaid on terrain models, wasn't clean enough for publication, among other data issues."

The Governor of Maine, John Baldacci, helped in the launching of the Ice Age Trail Map in the university town of Orono. The map and guide gave impetus for the UHaul SuperGraphic for the state of Maine (to be seen on 1200 moving trucks across the continent). Hermann points out that although he didn't design the graphic (to keep the design aligned with other UHaul SuperGraphics) it is "one of the few cartographic examples in the UHaul fleet." Check out the SuperGraphic on the UHaul web page.

"It is personally satisfying to claim top honors with this one," Hermann says. "It also is a solid endorsement on a national scale of the quality of the maps produced at the Canadian-American Center and the University of Maine."