Four women Mapboxers embark on the ultimate navigation challenge
Follow our teams on the Rebelle Rally as they head off-road and truly offline
By: Brynne Henn
8 days. 2,000 kilometers. Over 120 checkpoints. Few roads. No GPS. All women. The Rebelle Rally is a one-of-a-kind mapping, navigation, and driving challenge.
On Thursday, myself and three co-workers are heading off for 8 days of driving and navigating public dirt roads, double tracks, and sand dunes across Nevada and Southern California, using only paper maps and a compass for guidance. The Rebelle blends demanding driving environments with the requirement for precise navigation to reach remote checkpoints — without the mapping and navigation tools we all carry around in our pockets every day.
At Mapbox we spend our days working to perfect ways to help people navigate anywhere in the world. When we sponsored the rally last year, we knew it was an amazing opportunity to use our live-mapping platform to let spectators track this one-of-a-kind race, while appreciating advances in digital mapping by bringing us all the way back to the basics of paper maps and compasses.
But after Emily Miller spoke at Locate in May, we had another reason to be involved — the Rebelle is the ultimate testing ground of leadership and adventure.
That’s why this year we’re taking it a step further — by putting our own leaders into the race with more than 40 other teams. Our rally teams feature two driver/navigator combinations, “Team Sally” #180 with our Search Product Lead Karen Ellenberger and myself, and “Team Amelia” #181 featuring Developer Relations Lead, Amy Lee Walton, and Paige Moody, Map Data Specialist.
Karen guides product for our Search team, and helps the team find the right datasets to continually improve the map. I lead our Content Marketing team, crafting our story across our blog, social, and email. Amy Lee is the perfect participant for the rally — as one of our prolific Map Designers and head of Designer Relations, she understands the importance of getting each part of the map right and will now test that in the field. Paige will be right at home leading Team Amelia as Navigator, given her day-to-day of ground-truthing live-map data collected from our Vision SDK.
All the teams have spent the last few months learning everything from the basics of plotting and triangulation to technical dune driving. Starting Thursday, October 11th, we’re putting those skills to the test. Folks at Mapbox with more connectivity than me will be sharing highlights on the blog and across social. Follow along on our live map to see just how accurate — or off course — we are, and catch a recap each day from the ground: https://www.rebellerally.com/live-tracking.
Four women Mapbox-ers embark on the ultimate navigation challenge was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.