The Pacific Slope
Mexico and Central America, where the rain runs west
▶ Play it onlineOn the North America plate this is one long piece: all the land between the continental divide and the Pacific, from the Sonoran Desert down to Panama. Cut open, it turns out to be a string of very different places. The desert rivers of Sonora and Sinaloa, the Lerma-Santiago that drains the high plateau around Guadalajara, the Balsas that collects half of central Mexico, and the short, steep rivers of the southern coast, where the Sierra Madre del Sur drops almost straight into the sea. The piece for Southern Mexico is the next step down towards Oaxaca.
What a child works out
- A continental divide can run the whole length of a country.
- Rivers on a narrow coast are short and steep; rivers on a plateau are long.
- One piece on a big map can hold a desert and a rainforest.
A download, to print yourself
- A .3mf file with the colours already assigned
- One STL per piece, for any other slicer
- A print guide with the settings and the order to print in
- For your own use; the licence is in the download
What you need to print it
- A build plate that takes 250 × 176 mm: the Bambu Lab A1, P1S and X1C (256 mm) do, the A1 mini (180 mm) does not
- A multicolour setup such as an AMS, for the colours as designed
Printed it? Got an idea?
Send me photos of your print and I'll add them to this page — or tell me what you'd add, leave out or change on The Pacific Slope.
The plate
- Pieces
- 8 pieces
- Plate
- 250 × 176 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 17.3 km
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 13.11
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 184 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
B5 — the size of a school exercise book.
How much ground one millimetre of plate covers.
Height is stretched by this factor so the relief is readable at desk size.
Nothing is cut smaller than a child can pick up.
Printed in place, so every piece seats first time without sanding.
Every named piece
- Balsas
- Central America
- Jalisco and Colima
- Lerma Santiago
- Nayarit
- Sinaloa
- Sonora
- Southern Mexico
Zoom in, zoom out
A piece of each of these is the subject of the next one. Each plate is redrawn at its own scale, so it is a real map at every level rather than an enlargement of the one above.
Follow the water — World → North America by River → Pacific Slope → Southern Mexico → Río Verde → Oaxaca
More from Watersheds
See all →
North America by River
A continent divided only by where water goes
No countries, no states. Twenty-nine pieces, each one the whole territory that drains into a single river.
- Pieces
- 28 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 49.4 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
The Mississippi
The basin that drains a third of a continent
Fifteen pieces — Missouri, Ohio, Arkansas, Red, Illinois — that together are about three million square kilometres of drainage.
- Pieces
- 13 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 14.5 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00
The Upper Mississippi
The river before the Missouri joins it
Twenty-one pieces — the Minnesota, the St Croix, the Wisconsin, the Des Moines, the Cedar — draining the northern half of the Mississippi.
- Pieces
- 16 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 4.7 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00