National parks are fantasy worlds in the maps of a Colorado artist

Not long ago in his parents’ Colorado Springs home, a young man came by his boyhood pen.

This was the Lamy Safari Fountain pen Alex Burden had used some 20 years ago during elementary school in Germany. “The last time I used one was in third grade,” he recalled.

Now he got an idea.

With that fine, inky point, he traced over the penciled lines of a drawing — a sketch of a very real place that appeared unreal, fantastical, on the page.

It was a depiction of his favorite national park, Arches. It was as if a realm of Middle Earth, indeed a Tolkien map depicting bizarre outcrops called Delicate Arch and Dark Angel, the foreboding towers of Fiery Furnace, an arrow pointing the way to Castle Valley.

The pen brought the landscape to life. And the process was “meditative,” Burden found. “Therapeutic.”

So began his foray into a world turned magical.

Arches National Park is one of many national parks imagined as maps posted on Burden’s Etsy page, called Cryptocartographyart. The page showed 1,400 sales at last check, with more than 330 reviews raving about the prints that, according to one on Grand Teton National Park, “show a unique perspective and give me ideas for my next visit.”

They are not the maps you grab at the national park entrance. Not those detailed, trail-by-trail renderings. Burden’s maps don’t inspire direction as much as imagination through exaggerated features: triangular peaks marching across Rocky Mountain National Park; the stacked layers of the Grand Canyon threaded by a blue river; the piping Old Faithful of Yellowstone; a hulking Mount Rainier; a gaping Crater Lake floating over the forest; Joshua Tree’s desert like a waving ocean.

Rather than maps, the works might be more “love letters” or “interpretations,” as Burden has called them. In a traditional map, a landscape “doesn’t look as amazing as it does in real life I feel like,” he said. “I try to capture the atmosphere of it.”

He does so first with research, with an in-depth study of the place on the ground or Google Earth. And, yes, he takes a close eye to those traditional maps, noting mystical landmarks. (Temple of the Sun and the Golden Throne, for example, at Capitol Reef National Park.)

“It’s been amazing going back and finding out more about these parks and landscapes I never knew about,” Burden says.

That includes Garden of the Gods in his backyard. “I had never heard about Sleeping Giant,” he says. “I never knew they were called Gray Rock and South Gateway Rock.”

There they are on the page, those formations like cathedrals, jutting over the terrain below a volcano-looking Pikes Peak, soaring in the sky beside the puffy clouds and crescent moon that are signature to all of Burden’s maps.

“It’s wonderful in terms of making art again, which I always wanted to do but didn’t think I could invest much time in,” said Burden, 28. “On every level it’s something very nostalgic. It’s a return to just childhood and adventure.”

A return, maybe, to Germany.

Burden was starting kindergarten when the Air Force stationed his father there. It was the homeland of Burden’s mom, Lise, who would take her boy to the town close to her childhood farm: Rothenburg, one of the world’s best-preserved medieval towns.

“Of course we went to a lot of medieval castles and cities,” Lise said. “We did a lot of visiting around Germany and Italy and Switzerland and Austria.”

And then it was back to America, where the Air Force bounced the family around from previous stops in Washington, D.C., to Kentucky to Texas to Iowa to Colorado Springs by the time Burden was in middle school.

“So the world was already big when he was a little guy,” Lise said.

She noticed him trying to capture it all with pen and paper. Once, from a hotel room in St. Louis, he drew the Arch — that famed Gateway to the West that foretold his fascination in later years.

In Colorado Springs, the family vacationed to Arches National Park. “I think that’s when Alex’s love for the national parks was born,” Lise said. “He realized that love for nature and the American West.”

He loved it about as much as Dr. Seuss and “Treasure Island” and “Lord of the Rings” and a number of other fantasies. “I think the movie ‘Atlantis’ he watched 100 times,” his mom said.

In middle school, through shared interests in animation, Burden befriended Devin Solano. They kept in touch through Burden’s wanderlust college years in Boulder.

“I might’ve been the only one in Colorado that wanted to keep going to all these weird places he wanted to go to,” Solano said. “Abandoned mines sounded cool to me.”

Astrophysics sounded cool to Burden — sensible, lucrative, the mysteries of outer space. But the study proved difficult, combined with his studies in anthropology and German.

Burden described the astronomical pursuit as miserable. “Unfortunately I don’t have a head for math.”

He had a head for adventure, though, which anthropology provided. He picked up seasonal work with the U.S. Forest Service, heading off to the desert to scout sites hiding anything like arrowheads, shards of pottery and crumbled remains of ancient dwellings.

“I really like the whole, I don’t know, the whole Indiana Jones-esque part of it,” Burden said.

He especially likes the mapmaking part, as required in the case of findings. Between jobs back home in Colorado Springs, Burden continued the mapmaking — not for Forest Service records, but for his own creative energy. And for friends and family, too; the whimsical landscapes were good gifts, he found.

Burden posted prints online to find strangers interested in buying. “It was tremendously validating,” he said.

The money has been nice, supplementing the seasonal income from the Forest Service. But Burden sounds wary of any major growth in business obscuring his joy. “This is a passion project,” he said. “If it wasn’t fun anymore, I think I would stop making them.”

Sometimes the world we want conflicts with the world we live in. What Burden wants is to keep traveling; he recently roamed Malaysia and Thailand with his childhood friend, Solano.

The time allowed for deep reflection, Solano said. He’s also continuing artwork in his quarter-life stage, that stage on the way to selfhood.

“I guess we find it interesting the way people live their lives and have ideals they aspire toward,” Solano said. “College degrees and families and stuff, and we know people who’ve made that work. ... I guess we’ve chosen more of a nomadic lifestyle. We’re not really sure. We’ve mentioned this to each other: The worst times of our lives have been when we really feel like we know what we want.”

This seems certain: Burden is holding fast to a sense of wonder.

“He has found a niche or a way to live where he can maximize that,” his mom said.

So he’ll keep searching for artifacts part of the year, traveling for the other part. He’ll keep drawing wonderful worlds.

Lately, he’s had a different kind of map in mind.

“Some kind of combination of empirical map with optical illusion,” he said. “Maps that in some way are like puzzle pieces. You have to work looking at them. Where the optical illusions are, where the secret spaces are. You have to really figure out what’s going on.”

It’s a working concept, he said. “I haven’t figured it out yet myself.”