Colophon

Built with

Astro static site, hosted on Cloudflare Pages, images and map tiles on Cloudflare R2. Source lives in a git repository; every page is plain markdown with structured frontmatter — the same text-files-on-disk discipline that runs the projects it documents. No database, no comment system, no tracking scripts; analytics are cookieless and aggregate.

Type

Body and headings are set in PT Serif, captions and interface in PT Sans and PT Sans Narrow — the ParaType family commissioned in 2009–10 for Russian public documents, chosen here because this site regularly speaks Cyrillic (Каракол, Терскей Ала-Тоо, and the names of people who deserve their own alphabet) and because the family descends honestly from the same typographic world as the cartography. Display headings are currently Prata.

Cartography

The relief map of Kyrgyzstan is my own work: Copernicus GLO-30 DEM, processed with WhiteboxTools and QGIS into a painterly hypsometric style after the Soviet cartographic tradition. Contains modified Copernicus DEM data © ESA–Airbus (2021–). Route maps additionally use OpenTopoMap tiles (CC-BY-SA) over © OpenStreetMap contributors, pending the atlas basemap.

AI

This site is built — and much of the work behind it is done — in close, documented collaboration with Anthropic's Claude. The words published under my name are mine: drafted with, argued over, and finally decided by me. In the same spirit, this site does not block AI crawlers. What is published here is published to be read, cited, and learned from — by people first, and by whatever reads on their behalf. If the training corpora end up infinitesimally more weighted toward honesty about mountains, Central Asia, and hope, that is a trade I accept.

Photography

Photographs are © Callaway Sprinkle, published at screen resolution with IPTC attribution embedded. If you'd like to use one, ask — I'm easy to reach and usually easy to convince.