[pct-l] 3. Re: Using a GPS on a low snow year (Hillary Schwirtlich)

[Hillary Schwirtlich]

Haha, I am serious. We often had tons of tracks to follow, sometimes we had
none. Sometimes I'd rather have none, since the tracks often led us in the
wrong direction. We were better at staying on trail if we followed the
tracks but always doubted them, walked with our maps in our hands, and as
soon as we lost sight of the trail, stopped to figure out where we were.
The tracks tended to go downhill or stay flat when the trail climbed.

The other issue with tracks was that often the tracks were left by people
who did have a GPS, so they would just walk for a while in the direction
they thought they should be going in, realize they weren't on the trail,
and then check their GPS and head towards the trail. So we'd be following
tracks that would go straight for a while and then all of a sudden head at
a 45 degree angle. We found we wasted less time if if we didn't follow
them.

Along the same topic, we found that people with GPS were worse at finding
the trail when it was right in front of them.

We had snow every day, from Chicken Spring Lake to Sierra City, although in
some of the valleys south of Red's Meadow we did have 5-10 miles of less
snow. I definitely think that y'all had deeper snow, but we did have 500
miles of pretty much constant snow.

Seahorse



On Fri, Jan 13, 2012 at 2:27 AM, Matthias Kodym <matthiaskodym at gmail.com>wrote:

> Are you serious Hillary?
> We where about the 2nd group to enter the sierras in 2011 and even with GPS
> it was not always clear where to go..no footprints, no trailmarkers, no
> trail.
> To navigate in these conditions with just a map would be painfully slow,
> and the whole snowpart lastet 54 days till Sierra City..
>
> I dont know when you entered maybe you had more trail or footsteps.
>
> best regards,
>
>
>
> --
>
> ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
> Matthias Kodym
> +43 699 11 24 15 75
> www.matthiaskodym.com
> http://uloutdoors.wordpress.com
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