The novice backcountry traveler could be forgiven for thinking that a third edition of this book is unnecessary. Advancing technology, it seems, has made the craft of wilderness navigation obsolete. In 1998, when I finished the second edition of this book, satellite navigation devices using the Global Positioning System (GPS) were just starting to become readily available at prices outdoorsmen were willing to pay. The GPS receivers of the day were rather heavy, were slow to get a position fix, had no decent built-in maps, and were only accurate to about 100 meters or so because the military was deliberately degrading the signals available to consumers to reduce the usefulness of GPS units to potential terrorists. All that has changed, as I’ll describe fully in Chapter 7, and some naïve wilderness travelers now think that all they need to find their way in the woods is a GPS unit.
A modern GPS receiver, with its pinpoint precision and built-in maps, is indeed an invaluable aid in wilderness navigation if the user takes the time to master it, but it is not a substitute for old-fashioned map-and-compass skills, nor can it replace common sense. Here’s an example: In 2006 a pair of mountaineers reached the summit of Oregon’s Mt. Hood, then got lost in a whiteout as they descended the peak. They had a GPS receiver and a compass, but they had forgotten to mark Timberline Lodge, their starting point, as a waypoint in their GPS unit and had neither a map nor an altimeter. They did, however, have a cell phone. Wilderness travelers should never count on having cell-phone service, which is often unavailable in the backcountry. Fortunately one climber’s cell phone did have coverage. With darkness approaching, the climbers called 911.
The search-and-rescue leader who fielded the call was able to determine that the GPS receiver was set to the wrong map datum, so it was giving an inaccurate position fix. In addition, the GPS unit was reading out their position in latitude and longitude instead of UTM coordinates, which are much easier to use. To compound their woes, the climber’s set-and-forget compass was set to 20 degrees west declination when it should have been set to 20 degrees east. That meant that when they tried to walk the compass bearing provided by the rescue leader, they were heading 40 degrees to the right of the direction they should have gone. A search-and-rescue team eventually found them several hours after dark and escorted them to safety, cold and exhausted but unharmed.
Any electronic device can malfunction or run out of battery power of course, but there are other ways that a GPS unit can fail you (or, should I say, that you can fail it). I once spent two hours trying to find a wedding reception in Indianapolis because the driver, who had lived in the area for many years, had entered “123 Washington St.” in her GPS receiver when she should have entered “123 N. Washington St.” Stories are now legion of drivers following directions on their GPS units and taking roads to nowhere, eventually running out of gas or getting stuck in deep sand or snow. Rangers in Death Valley, who seem to be constantly searching for lost motorists in the huge, desolate valley’s notoriously hot, 120-degree summer months, have even started referring to these tragic incidents as “Death by GPS.”
Don’t get me wrong: GPS receivers are a tremendous aid when the navigating gets difficult, but they don’t stand alone as route-finding tools. Here’s a case in point: For the last five years, I’ve been working on a series of photographs shot at sunrise from the summits of Colorado’s fifty-four 14,000-foot peaks, the Fourteeners. Camping on the summit is too dangerous at any time of year due to the risk of high-altitude illness. If I drove straight from my home in Boulder at 5,000 feet to the trailhead, then hiked to the summit of a Fourteener and camped, I’d probably wake up with an excruciating altitude headache or worse, if I could sleep at all. During the summer months the ubiquitous afternoon lightning storms also create a serious risk of electrocution. Another obstacle to camping on the summit is logistical: It’s a lot of work to carry camera gear and camping gear and a gallon of water to the summit, only to find that there’s no flat ground on which to camp. My solution has been to camp at timberline and climb the peaks in the dark. For that kind of difficult navigation, I always carry a US Geological Survey (USGS) 7.5 minute topographic map (the most detailed available), a mirror-sight compass, and a high-quality wristwatch altimeter. Weight is critical in mountaineering, and important even when hiking and backpacking, so for years I would leave my aging, first-generation GPS receiver at home unless it was wintertime or my route led off-trail through the woods. Today’s GPS receivers are so easy to use and so versatile, however, that a modern receiver has now become standard equipment for me.
Not even the most advanced technology, however, is a substitute for paying close attention to your surroundings as you hike. Even veteran backpackers can make mistakes, as I discovered to my chagrin on a recent backpacking trip in Utah’s Canyonlands National Park with my fourteen-year-old daughter, Audrey. We had decided to explore Ernies Country and the Fins, a remote area on the west side of the park. There is a cairned route through Ernies Country, but it can hardly be called a trail. Canyonlands National Park is high desert, so finding water sources is critical. Our USGS topographic map had two springs marked along our route. Before the trip I consulted with a ranger who’d been patrolling the region for more than twenty years. He confirmed that the springs were reliable in all but the worst droughts and that both springs were flowing when he visited recently. Since it was springtime and the winter rains had been adequate, we anticipated no problems.
We hiked in on our first day and located the first spring, which lay a short distance up a spur trail off the main route. At the spring we refilled our water bottles, and then we continued on and camped near the second spring. After a day of exploring the Fins, we camped again and then headed out the way we had come in. By now we knew the terrain; surely we couldn’t get lost retracing our steps.
An hour after breaking camp, we emerged from a side canyon just where two sandy washes came together. Our route continued up one of the two washes. The wash heading north looked unfamiliar—too narrow to be the route we’d taken on our way in. We chose the wash that led west instead.
Half a mile later I knew we had somehow missed a turn. The footsteps in the sand, so plentiful in the beginning, had faded completely, and the terrain looked wholly unfamiliar. I pulled out the map, oriented it with the compass, and studied it. I knew where we had been just twenty minutes earlier, and I knew which direction we had been heading. To confirm my estimate of our position, I pulled out my GPS unit and took a position fix. It confirmed my understanding of our location. Obviously we should have taken the northern branch of the wash, not the western one. We retraced our steps and started up the northern branch.
But the terrain still didn’t look familiar. We were heading in the right direction, of that I was sure, but still weren’t on the trail we’d taken two days earlier.
Suddenly we encountered the first spring again. How could that be? To reach this spring two days earlier, we had taken a spur trail off the main route, but at no point today had we been on that spur trail. After another minute of confusion, I realized what had happened. We had made not one mistake but two. The west branch of the wash had been the correct branch, but we should only have followed it for a few hundred yards before leaving that wash and heading north, cross-country, following sparse cairns to the point where the spur trail led to the spring. We had missed that turnoff not once but twice. I had simply not paid enough attention to the terrain on the way out and not memorized that one crucial junction. Fortunately there were two routes to the spring: the spur trail we’d taken on our first day and a second trail that led directly to the spring from the junction of the two washes, bypassing the spur trail altogether.
Now that we were back on more familiar territory, finding the rest of the route back to my truck was easy. I kept the map and compass handy nonetheless.
It’s true that I could have created a GPS waypoint at the critical trail junctions, which would have alerted me much sooner to my mistake. Even if I had done so, however, I should still have been studying the terrain and memorizing landmarks much more carefully.
Everyone who plays or works outdoors needs route-finding skills. Day hikers and backpackers will find a map and compass useful for identifying landmarks, making the correct turn at trail junctions, and estimating travel time—even if they always follow established trails. Popular trails in most national parks are usually heavily trodden ribbons of civilization, well marked and obvious, with all too many other visitors to set you straight if you get confused. Venture into the remote parts of the national parks, however, or into forest service wilderness areas, and even trails marked on the map can be much harder to follow. Trails may be marked wrong on the map or have been rerouted since the map was printed. Unsigned trail junctions are easy to miss. Lightly used trails across meadows can become overgrown and vanish completely. During a nine-day, 95-mile backpacking trip along the Continental Divide Trail in southwest Colorado, we found multiple places where the trail as marked on the map didn’t correspond to the trail—or lack of trail—we found on the ground. Near Weminuche Pass we only found the right route by carefully identifying the correct side valley on the map. No visible trail led across the meadow from the main trail to the base of the side valley. Only after entering the side valley did we relocate a visible track. That same day we encountered a hiker trying to follow the same route who had walked more than a mile out of his way, with a heavy pack, before discovering his mistake and retracing his steps.
Everyone who heads off-trail, even occasionally, will find route-finding tools essential. When you are bushwhacking through dense forest, with the surrounding peaks hidden by trees, a map and compass will keep you on track. Snowshoers and cross-country skiers leave tracks, of course; but in meadows and above timberline, it takes only a few hours of snow and wind to obliterate those tracks completely. Mountaineers traveling on glaciers and large snowfields are completely dependent on their route-finding abilities (and foresight in marking their trails) whenever fog and storms move in. Sea-kayakers and canoeists crossing open water must also be accomplished navigators. Even river-runners, who always know in what direction they’re heading, need to know how to use a map and compass to find a special side canyon or a particular campsite.
Most of the third edition of this book, like the first and second, is devoted to teaching the fundamentals of navigating with map, compass, and altimeter. In fact, I’ve written most of the book as if you didn’t have a GPS receiver available to you. The third edition would not have been complete, however, without dramatically expanding the chapter on GPS receivers. I’ll take a close look at the latest GPS units, with their detailed, built-in maps and sophisticated route-creation and tracking capabilities, and show you how they can interface with maps on your desktop computer to give you still more ways to find your way in the wilderness. GPS receivers today are vastly more capable than the primitive unit I bought in the late 1990s.
Learning the craft of backcountry navigation using all of the available tools gives you the freedom to roam the wilderness at will in any season. Navigation skills, particularly the ability to read a map, also buy you a ticket to hours of mind travel: poring over possible routes and wondering what secrets some serpentine desert canyon holds, what fish might inhabit some lake lost in the wilderness far from any trail, or what elegant climbs might be possible on some sharp-edged ridge or daunting granite face. I still carry a book to read during idle hours, stormbound in camp, but I rarely crack it open. Instead I spend my free time poring over my maps, studying the way the contours lie and the streams run, memorizing the names of prominent peaks and lakes, and planning my next adventure. With maps and your imagination, the world is your playground.
After reading this book, you’ll know how to:
•Create a mental image of a landscape while studying a map;
•Use paper maps and computerized mapping tools to help plan your next adventure;
•Use a compass to find your way to a destination and back again;
•Combine map-reading and compass skills to identify a landmark, plot your course, and determine your location;
•Use an altimeter to pinpoint your position;
•Use a GPS receiver to navigate a course from one waypoint to the next, then find your way back home again;
•Avoid the most common route-finding errors;
•Use a whole array of easy navigation tricks that simplify staying found in the wilderness.
My father gave me my first compass when I was twelve, and I’ve been practicing getting lost with it ever since. Actually, to paraphrase Daniel Boone, I’ve never really been lost; I’ve just been mighty confused. After forty-two years of getting confused in far-flung wildernesses from Alaska to Argentina, I’ve learned route-finding the hard way. If you read this book carefully and (even more important) spend a few hours practicing the skills it teaches, you’ll master route-finding the easy way and save yourself a thousand anxious moments in the process.