From the Publisher
This is a review from a Park Ranger:
"I have found the greatest map CD of Death Valley!!
I personally purchased both the Topo! and Maptech map CDs of Death Valley and paid over $150.00 for these....
BUT, a company called Inyo Pro publishes a CD entitled "VR pano Illustrated Topographic Maps of Death Valley National Park" is one of the BEST that I've scene and used to date!
It is very inexpensive, great photos, 100,000 scale map...zooms and prints well.
Just to give an example....you can follow the trail to Telescope Peak....click on the star. . . and then see a panoramic view which you control!
This is one of the few CDs that I have seen which I would recommend to anyone who has not been to Death Valley or better yet, to people, like us, who enjoy the desert and Death Valley, and want to share the experience with others."
-- Dave Brenner, Park Ranger, Death Valley National Park
About the Author
Paul Fretheim was born in Dekalb, Illinois in 1951, but never lived there. During his earliest years his father was a traveling Gospel singer and preacher, and Paul and his family, which consisted of his mother and father and older sister, lived in a masonite trailer they towed with a 1947 Studebaker. The family traveled a circuit that took 6 months each way to cover back and forth between Los Angeles and Chicago along Route 66.
In 1954 the family settled down in southwestern Wisconsin, where Paul went to one room country school for the first three grades, walking 1-1/2 miles through the woods and swamps to school and back each day. "My life then," Paul writes, "was much more like 'Little House on the Prairie' than life in a modern city today."
The family then moved to Frankfort, Michigan, a midwestern version of Cape Cod, located on Lake Michigan, not far from the now Sleeping Bear National Seashore. After a few years alternating between bumming in Aspen, Colorado and going to college in Kalamazoo, Paul and his wife Maureen moved to an Indian reservation in western Montana and went "back to the land," living in a small log cabin carved out of the wilderness using 17th century techniques garnered from the Foxfire series.
During the latter part of the 10 years on the reservation, Paul completed a degree in Elementary education at the University of Montana, and became involved with the introduction of the then brand new technology of micro computers to education.
In 1983 Paul moved to Seattle, and for the next 12 years taught a special class for bright and gifted children for the Seattle Public Schools. During this time Paul also earned an M.Ed. degree in Educational Instructional Technology from the University of Washington in Seattle.
In 1992, en route to Albuquerque to speak at a conference on educational technology, Paul passed through Death Valley for the first time, and fell in love with this beautiful desert. Since that time he has returned again and again.
In 1998 Paul left public education and moved to Independence, the county seat of Inyo county, where Death Valley is located, to work on the creation of a series of educational virtual reality CD-ROMs on Death Valley National Park, and now makes his home in the tiny village of Independence, CA, in the shadow of the great eastern escarpment of the Sierra Nevada.
