Run. Don’t turn to see what’s coming. Just run.
Possibly the world of wilderness traveling will soon become divided into two main camps: Minimalists and Technologists. I’ve become firmly entrenched in the Minimalist camp already. GPS units fascinate me but I still carry the topo map and compass and only play with the GPS. My gear gets simpler every year.
I’ll get to the Delorme Earthmate in just a moment, but I’m presently stuck on a major issue, and that is just how much of the outer world we ought to bother carrying into the wilderness with us. I do adhere to the old rule of garbage in, garbage out. If I haul something in with me, it comes out with me, usually as garbage. But even though I take a strange number of heavy things when I hike, I’m never going to fall in love with constant communication with the outside world. I go hiking and camping to get away from that.
Some years ago when the cell phone craze took over the minds of susceptible individuals, turning everyone into pods of their former selves with strange parasitic electronic devices bolted to their heads in various places, the daughter of a friend of mine suggested to her that they should get cell phones so they could talk to each other all the time. That pretty much horrified me and I was really surprised that an adult would take that seriously. But she did. To me being hooked up to the Borg is a lot more attractive than being in constant communication with a teenager. I guess I’m unusual.
Now I see discussions on hiking forums about the proper use of cell phones on trails — whether it’s polite to talk on them or whether they should be set to vibrate rather than ringtone. My mind responds to that with ? Cell phone? Why? Fortunately, cell phones have been line of sight devices — up to now. If a transmitter tower isn’t on your side of the horizon, you have a useless little electronic box, not a communications system. If you walk far enough you can get to a place without bars, and then the cell phone isn’t a problem, if you’re a Minimalist.
Now the Delorme Earthmate intends to use the SPOT satellite system to allow text messaging anywhere you can get a GPS reading. While that’s not absolutely anywhere and signals can be scrambled by obstacles and blocked by terrain, satellite communications should be possible in nearly any location. The Earthmate allows text communications only, no voice, but it’s still a violation of primal privacy, in my opinion.
The argument in favor of this sort of thing is, of course, based on people not wanting to die. If you get injured and lost, or maybe just lost if you’re short of wilderness skills, you can die out there. If you have an infallible system of communication, somebody can come save you.
Much of what people do regarding the back country is based on being afraid of what happens when things go wrong. I’ve heard all the rules, and over the years I’ve found that I’m happier paying no attention to many of them. I don’t tell people where I’m going and when I’ll be back. I tell people I’m going away and I don’t know when I’ll be back. I don’t always travel on trails, and I often travel alone. For many of my first years of doing this, I did take that supremely organized and safest path, but I never really liked it. The first time I broke that law and got off the trail, in a place I’d never seen before, where nobody knew to come find me, it turned out to be the experience I was seeking all along.
So let me tell you a secret: we’re all going to die, and sometimes the choice will be whether we die sitting on a mountain with a broken leg watching the sun set, or whether we die sitting on a mountain with a broken leg trying to punch “Help me” into a Delorme Earthmate.
Run. The Delorme Earthmate is coming.
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Hi Jimmy,
Great website you have here!
I believe if you were to use the Delorme Earthmate rather than your trusted topo map and compass you might actually increase your chances of dying lost in the wilderness or, suffering a broken leg from falling off a cliff.
Several years ago I purchased Delorme Street Atlas and their GPS Receiver that plugs into a USB port on a laptop to use while driving to my service calls. The GPS worked well but there was a glaring fault with the map software.
The inaccuracy of their map software was horrendous! It was not uncommon to be driving down a road not knowing if your were on the right street or, one block off, because the map showed you driving through the backyards between the two streets. In addition to that quite often they showed roads that didn’t exist, and hadn’t for some time as there was a stone wall that was at least 100 years old without any openings for a road for some distance in either direction. On numerous occasions the software plotted my travel route through 4 wheel drive trails or, roads that were not open to vehicular traffic, and either never had been or, hadn’t been open in the last 40 years.
I’m convinced that Delorme when they made their map software used every map, good or, bad that they could find to input their mapping data, and never once checked anything for accuracy. When I called to complain about the mapping quality and ask if they had any updates they tried selling me the latest version that came out several months after I had purchased mine rather than fix anything. I declined their generous offer that didn’t even include a discount basically because I suspected that none of the inaccuracies I had detected had actually been fixed and they were merely blowing smoke up my six….
If the inaccuracies are that bad on maps that could easily be corrected by overlaying them on a satellite photo, I could only guess at how bad they would be on trails that wouldn’t show on a satellite photo, and might have included hand drawn, not to scale trail maps in their database.
Good Luck if you ever try the Delorme Earthmate! Keep your eyes open, and use the topo maps, and compass as a backup so you don’t get lost. I’d hate to see someone get hurt following an alleged trail over a cliff that has been there for a couple of million years.
Redwood
Hi, Redwood,
Thanks, I liked your website very much also, I’m more an electronics guy than a plumbing guy but all my instructors said you could understand electronics in terms of plumbing, as though that were simpler or something. Hey, they’ve never worked on plumbing I guess.
I laughed and laughed at your comments about the Delorme Earthmate, I think maybe I nearly ran into you in Poland, Indiana, a couple of years ago. Alice and I were coming back from work one day and at the far edge of town I saw a fellow in a utility truck crouched over the dashboard and said to Alice, uhoh, that guy’s trouble. A couple of minutes later we passed each other, narrowly, I had to drive through one of the yards in town to avoid him and honked as I went past, he was in the wrong lane and headed for somebody’s mailbox as we went by him, glued to that GPS screen instead of watching the road. I did see a plumbing sign on the truck. He managed to pull it back on the road before he ran over anything too important. There should be an automatic warning on those things when you’re headed for a mailbox.