Jonathan Van Coops was born in July 1954 to parents from multi-generation Bay Area families that came to San Francisco and its environs in the mid-19th and early 20th centuries. His ancestry is a mixture of Swedish, Danish and coastal Germanic on his paternal side and mostly a mixture of Spanish and Indigenous American ancestry on his maternal side. After spending his early years in Casper, Wyoming and Petaluma, California, he grew up during the 1960s in the Albany/West Berkeley area of San Francisco's East Bay. Baseball and bicycling accompanied his academics and interest in music as his education progressed towards graduation from Albany High School in 1972. By 1970, he was a star pitcher on the baseball team and had begun riding his bike into the hilly parks and watershed lands east of Berkeley, beginning decades of longer distance cycling in the East Bay, throughout the Bay region and well-beyond. After playing baseball at Laney College and Humboldt State University, he spent some time away from studying, got married, worked as a teamster and became a father. He resumed his education at San Francisco State University, where he graduated with honors in Geography in 1977. He was employed by the California Coastal Commission as a cartographer ‒ a map maker ‒ in April of that year and began a 38-year career involved in all aspects of mapping California's Coastal Zone. In 1980, he moved across the Bay to a Sausalito houseboat in Marin County while continuing his work with Coastal Commission, becoming the Coastal Commission's Mapping Program Manager after several years. In addition to his role of providing mapping support for the Commission's regulatory and planning operations he was the principal cartographer for numerous successful coastal access and guide books published by the Commission between 1980 and 2015.Throughout his long career he continuously expanded the Commission's Mapping Program capabilities, adding personnel and integrating the use of computer-assisted drafting and geographic information system (GIS) technology into the agency's mapping operations. At the same time he was taking his love of cycling to new horizons ‒ riding longer distance routes throughout the Bay region, northern California and along the coast. Besides local jaunts, he bicycled 250 miles over several days in July of 1984 to see the cycling events of the XXIII Olympiad in Los Angeles.A list of his coastal maps produced over nearly four decades could be accompanied by a list of his most memorable rides from the same period. The World's Toughest Triathlon, Markleeville Death Ride, Ride Around Mt. Rainier in One Day, Seattle to Portland. In July of 2006 he fulfilled a long time dream by going to France for a month with his bike, cycling 1500 kilometers and seeing the fabled Tour de France bike race, in person. Since retiring in 2015, he has spent time deepening his understanding of a remarkable and well-documented family history while also continued to tap his enthusiasm for maps and bicycles by riding and writing. In 2019, he produced a unique map and translation of El Rondín by Esteban Luján, a first-person account of the historically-important 1912 uprising of Pasqual Orozco, Jr. in Chihuahua, Mexico during the early years of that country's Revolution. Two additional works, A Serious Cyclist's Guide to San Francisco and Beyond and A Cycling Life ‒ Stories of a Serious Cyclist, are planned for publication in 2024. Residing in the North Beach/Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco for over thirty years and approaching age 70, his daily bike rides are now typically in the one to two-hour range, leaving plenty of time for his other passions: a two-year old great granddaughter, his cartography, writing and preparing healthy, delicious meals ‒ fit for any serious cyclist!
