[pct-l] Of compasses and screws

[Brian Lewis]

Seems to me that there are two general ways in which a compass is used.  One
is to get a more vague "North is roughly that-a-way" sense to orient the map
with more confidence than just trail and visible terrain gives context for.
 The other use is to get a more accurate read, shooting an azimuth, perhaps
triangulating --- "am I on the southern or northern trail in this vicinity",
or "which trail junction have I just encountered", that sort of thing.   Or
perhaps more compelling, to pick out which likely looking spot is actually
the snow covered pass that you're headed towards.
I suspect that most people, most of the time are doing the former.  I agree,
however, that it's important to be able to do the latter, but IMO any
compass whose needle rotates freely and has an adjustment for magnetic
declination (bezel ring) is sufficient.  Maybe if your style of compass use
is different, you'll find things like mirror or straight edge or scale or
whatever to be useful.

On the topic of putting screws into tennis shoes, note that thru-hiking this
year I virtually never encountered ice; maybe a very little around Fuller
ridge (?), definitely one oh-crap moment climbing vertically up Forester
Pass, but that was about it.

I suspect that screws in tennis shoes could help in some limited way in
snow, but not at all like (as good as) actual crampons.  For snow (not ice),
I'd rather have even the most minimal set of instep crampons.  That said,
I've never used the screw-in-shoe approach.     Might be useful if I wanted
to take them off and hurl them at a world leader ("Bush-Shoe-Do" --- the way
of hurling shoes at an outgoing President).

I carried a set of (no longer manufactured) ULA mini-crampons into the
Sierras, but conditions this year hardly warranted putting them on anywhere.
 For me, at least, it would have been too much hassle putting them on and
then taking them off peridocially, when I generally got good traction with
my unadorned trail runners, so I mailed the mini-crampons home and didn't
miss 'em.    We had a bit of snow in Oregon to deal with too (Jefferson
wilderness), but ditto, never an inclination towards crampons there even had
I been carrying them.

Of course each year can be different, but unless particularly cold
conditions are anticipated, my inclination would be to carry no
foot-traction devices of any kind.


Brian Lewis
http://postholer.com/brianle