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comrade1234
If you ever come to Switzerland download the swisstopo app. It is very detailed and useful for hiking but even in the city too, showing the locations of fountains, for example, rural and urban official and unofficial hiking trails, closed trails, slopes too steep to traverse, etc etc etc.

The Swiss topographical institute is a treasure.

kakacik
This is where screenshots come from, official topo data are free. I use them all the time for hiking, ski touring etc. Good thing they cover also neighboring mountains a bit (to varying detail) so ie France or Italy can be enjoyed just with a single app.

Then you go further and realize how much worse free easy to find things are. There are variations of opentopomap but they lack the finesse of this.

Also available in various other layouts ie biking (veloland), canoeing or various winter sports (sadly no outright ski touring so I aproximate summer hiking paths, the best to use are still physical maps but then you need a hefty stash of various zooms at home, pricey too).

But none is perfect - opentopo map has some obscure artifacts, see ie here what I found by a chance - some hole too deep to be real, near Aletsch glacier or famous Eiger, a mountain slope in Bernese alps [1], while official Swiss topo looks like this without any such illogical artifact [2]

[1] https://opentopomap.org/#map=15/46.55901/8.07171 [2] https://schweizmobil.ch/en/map?season=summer&bgLayer=pk&laye...

philipallstar
> illustrations hidden by the official cartographers at Swisstopo in defiance of their mandate “to reconstitute reality.”

This is such an odd idea.

TwoFerMaggie
Slightly annoying that the magnified parts are directly over their original location. This blocks the view to see them in their original size and context.
jmward01
I recently read 'The Cartographers' by Peng Shepherd. If you like this article and want to read a fun murder mystery about things hidden in maps then that is definitely the book for you. (No relation to the author here, I just liked the book!)
qwertox
Appending a "for Kids" would turn them into immediate heroes.
725686
I haven't read the article, but aren't these introduced to detect illegal copies?
jasonjmcghee
The marmot, hiker, and fish- alright. I buy it. The others... Feels a bit like finding shapes in the clouds.

But I'm no cartographer so maybe these are more obvious to people that have the skill.

pinkmuffinere
Ya, i was shocked at the “reclining woman” entry, I can’t see anything in that pattern.
The-Bus
As long as they keep their hidden illustrations away from my precious Swiss chocolate logos!
keepamovin
When I was a cartographer in the 1500s I used to hide dragons, sea serpents and the occasional heretical inscription in the blank bits, because at least back then the Holy Roman Emperor had the decency to pretend he didn’t notice as long as the tax broders were correct.

Now look at us: the Swiss federal cartographers, salaried, pensioned, triple-proofread, still cannot resist smuggling a naked woman and a cheeky marmot into the official topography. And the admisntration? They wait until the perpetrator has safely retired on full index-linked benefits, then solemnly announce the marmot will be "removed in the next revision cycle, pending environmental-impact assessment of the pixel."

This is what passes for rebellion inside the European regulatory state: a rodent drawn at 1:25 000 scale that offends precisely no one and will be erased by a civil servant who wasn’t even born when it was sketched. Truly the revolutionary spirit of our continent has been reduced to a change-request ticket with fourteen mandatory approvers and a carbon-copy to Bern.

I fill in another compliance form and weep for the age when men risked the stake for a badly drawn leviathan.

SegfaultSeagull
In case you didn’t recognize this as an epic comment, you should know this is an epic comment.
shmeeed
>European regulatory state

*Switzerland

endymion-light
The looming sense of EU technocracy is ever present - I guess the kind of person to take offence at a cheeky marmot is probably going to be a perfect drone beurocrat. Although we do have to ask ourselves as a society, if we live in a world were a cartographer can't sneak in a little drawing, is it a world worth living?

I think what we need to do is fund an exhibition into the swiss alps to reconstute the terrain in the shape of a funny little marmot.

lwkl
Most of them were only in the lower scale maps and one of them is still there. Swisstopo even wrote an article [1] about them and gives some background and names the cartographers that added them. So our bureaucratic machine seems to have a sense of humor.

[1] https://www.swisstopo.admin.ch/en/hidden-images-20161221

pugworthy
A different kind of map, but 3d level (map) designers seem to enjoy doing Easter eggs and hidden things in levels. There are the famous Half-Life G-man cameos for example, which aren't quite fourth wall as it were, but still something not many know of.
jval43
I miss all the easter eggs in software. Not just games, but also in business software.

Not sure what would happen if I tried to put one in in his day and age.

steve_gh
The spider is a particularly subtle joke: The White Spider is the name given to a snowfield high on the N Face of the Eiger, crossed by the original (1938) Heckmair Harrer route up the face. Heinrich Harrer's book about the first ascent is called "The White Spider"
nephihaha
I wonder if these are copyright traps. You used to find those in many places including Ordnance Survey maps (UK State mapping service), where they were used to stop plagiarism. (Successfully in some cases.)
amelius
These are clearly just hallucinations of their GenAI.
ninalanyon
I wonder if any such thing exists in Open Street Map?

And if not how might we bring it about?