The Swannanoa
One valley, fifteen creeks
At roughly 163 metres to the millimetre this is the most detailed plate offered, and the pieces are not named rivers — they are the creeks and hollows that feed one modest mountain river. That is the point. Four zoom levels above this, the Swannanoa is a speck inside the Mississippi's Ohio piece; here it fills a whole B5 plate and every fold of ground is legible. It is the puzzle that makes the abstraction land: this is what all of those pieces are made of, everywhere.
What a child works out
- Detail does not stop — a watershed can always be cut smaller.
- The creeks behind your house have territories too.
- Scale is a choice a mapmaker makes, and you can hold both ends of it.
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
The plate
- Pieces
- 15 pieces
- Plate
- 176 × 250 mm
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 163 m
- Vertical exaggeration
- × 1
- Thickness
- 8.8 mm
- Smallest piece
- 104 mm²
- Fit
- 0.35 mm clearance
- Material
- PLA, printed in Switzerland
Sub-basins, which the source data leaves unnamed — they are creeks and hollows, not rivers with names.
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.
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 — A continent to one creek, cut by ridge lines with no borders
More from Watersheds
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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
- 29 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
- 15 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
- 21 pieces
- Scale
- 1 mm ≈ 4.7 km
- Suitable for
- Ages 8 and up
- Price
- CHF 15.00