I tend to prefer navigating cities the old-school way: with my nose in a map half the time. I do not necessarily endorse this method. It’s needlessly time-consuming and wildly inefficient. There’s not some big ineffable aesthetic or philosophical gratification as payoff. I mostly do it because I’m afraid that relying too much on GPS navigation apps will turn my hipppocampus into pudding, or that I’ll succumb to that trippy digital hostage syndrome and blindly follow Siri’s directions as she navigates me into a lava pit. But I’m also convinced that it’s good and useful to flex a little cerebral muscle to create internal maps of the places we inhabit and visit. When you conscript memory, logic, and intuition, and employ landmarks and the live cityscape to move consciously in physical space, your deepened intent brings something like meaning to the relationship between the traveler and the terrain. Or, I don’t know, maybe you’ll still fall into a lava pit anyway.
This month’s illustrated feature, “ Charted Territory,” works on that fussy, overwrought premise. We crafted a small collection of maps to highlight different ways of looking at Southern Nevada — through memory, mystery, tragedy, history, and more. They won’t necessarily navigate you to a precise destination, but they will most certainly offer you a new way home.