The Rebelle Rally course map
Building an interactive experience to follow 43 offline teams across the desert
By: Casey Miller
On Friday, four of my co-workers, along with 82 other women, began the Rebelle Rally. I worked with the Rebelle Rally team to create an interactive map to help families, co-workers, and spectators follow the adventure. See the live tracking map here.
What’s it like to travel for 8 days, through 2,000 kilometers of wild, unknown terrain, in vehicles capable of climbing 60-degree slopes, while navigating without any of the digital tools and phones we’re used to?
We can’t all drive the course, and we can’t communicate with the courageous participants as they do. So we wanted to create an experience that would give a sense of the challenging journey.
The map shows terrain, course, and the location of checkpoints and other POIs, along with any photos or videos from those locations. We utilized a flyover effect to visualize the trip between points.
The map breaks out each day as a separate experience, so you can scroll through the relevant information and navigate the content as the teams progress. We’ve also added a mini-map in the bottom right corner that helps to place the current day’s plotted points in a greater context of where they lay within Nevada and California.
The data in the map is updated every 30 minutes and is pulled from a spreadsheet that the Rebelle organizers have access to and are able to edit on the fly.
I’m so proud of our Mapbox drivers — Karen, Brynne, Amy Lee, and Paige — for taking on this huge challenge. I’ll be following along closely on Rebelle’s site and hope you enjoy the map we built this year.
The Rebelle Rally Course Map was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.