About NV Explorer
How this started
I started this because I wanted somewhere to go on weekends. Mostly I was looking for overlooked places: old buildings, strange landscapes, anything that looked like it had a story and almost nobody was writing about it. For a while that meant panning around satellite view until something caught my eye.
That turned into a list. The first version got to about 200 places and started lying to me. The same town showed up under two names. Pins sat a mile from the ruins. Facts crept in that I could not trace back to anything.
So I rebuilt how the atlas gets made.
How the atlas gets made
The dataset is only allowed to grow from an approved list of sources. Government geographic records sit at the top of that list: USGS and GNIS for coordinates, and the NPS, BLM, Forest Service, Fish and Wildlife Service, Bureau of Reclamation, and state park agencies for access, land status, fees, and hours. A site that is not on the list does not count. If a place cannot be sourced from the list, it stays off the map. The alternative is letting whatever a search engine ranks first quietly become the sourcing policy.
Agreement is counted in independent publishers, not in browser tabs. geonames.org republishes GNIS, so it is not a second measurement of a US coordinate. Many Wikipedia and Wikidata place points are the same GNIS value with extra hops. Two pages repeating the same number are still one source. Leads from archives, old maps, and similar catalogs have to be re-checked against a primary record before they count.
An automated research assistant does the searching and reading against that list, but it does not get to decide what is true. The verdict is recomputed locally: enough independent publishers, the right kind of source for the claim, and nothing from the deny list. Findings land in a review pile. I move them onto the map, or I don't. Nothing is published automatically.
What goes on the map is field destinations: trailheads, townsites, overlooks, soaks, refuge units, geologic features, ruins. Ghost towns and rock art carry an Archaeological Resources Protection Act (ARPA) notice. Open shafts and known trespass sites stay out. Descriptions are original. I don't lift source text.
Right now the atlas has 1,914 landmarks across Nevada, California, Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico: ghost towns, historic sites, geology, wildlife areas, petroglyphs, hot springs, and more. Each one has its own page and an approximate coordinate.
Coordinates are plotted from published sources, not verified on site. Even official government data can be wrong or out of date. Treat every pin as a starting point, not a surveyed location, and treat the atlas as a planning aid, not a permit. Check current land-management rules before you go.
Exploring overlooked places is still the point. The atlas is how I keep the research organized, automate the tedious part of finding places, and put it where other people can use it. The long-term goal is simple: zoom in almost anywhere and find something worth the drive.
Side projects
The same habit produced the Lake Mead water-level map. It combines the USGS and Bureau of Reclamation survey of the lake floor (Open-File Report 03-320) with Reclamation's recorded pool elevations. Pick a date or a hypothetical level and see the shoreline it implies. It is a visualization, not a forecast or a navigation chart. Where the survey has no coverage, the map stays empty instead of inventing terrain.
