The mountains of southern Tajikistan

From the Spring 2021 edition of Climbing in Aotearoa: The New Zealand Alpine Journal

This map was created to illustrate an article by Pat Deavoll detailing the ascents of Pik Engels and Pik Karla Marksa in the Gorno-Badakhshan Autonomous Region of Tajikistan.

The European Space Agency had just released their WorldCover 2020 dataset which I used in combination with SRTM elevation data from OpenTopography and additional data from Natural Earth to create view of the locations mentioned in the article.

The elevation in the main view is warped using the Terrain Bender tool so that the foreground is top-down but the background is oblique. This allowed me to really highlight the elevation, while also showing the geographic relationships between the peaks and towns.