Made this for my brother in law and his wife as a christmas gift; they like hiking a lot of the trails around Vail, CO. I won’t bore you with all the details of the data manipulation, but the model has the topographic contours, hiking trails, I-70 highway, lakes, and peaks marked/labeled in it.
The project is 1/16" cherry and walnut woods, walnut finished with Danish Oil. I was going to finish the cherry with it too, but after assembling, I felt it looked better unstained. Wood is glued together and then mounted to the backing board of the shadow box with some small standoff hardware. Because I forgot to include something for scale, the topo part of the project is 10"x13", the overall piece fits into a 16"x20" shadowbox. The actual scale of the topo map is 1"=1 mile (horizontally; I didn’t do the math to figure out an accurate vertical scale ). And now to the pictures!