As you can see almost 60 percent of visitors to my website don't own a GPS and less than 20% use a GPS all the time. Satellite coverage can still be unreliable. Just last weekend three of us who were using a GPS lost coverage while hiking in the South fork of Pine Creek Canyon. A few days earlier I had coverage while hiking the same location with the same GPS (Garmin 60CSx).
When I first started documenting hikes for my first book, Hiking Las Vegas, GPS unit's accuracy was 100 yards or more. Pretty worthless for hiking in Red Rock Canyon or really most places. Although the accuracy has improved greatly, I still feel people should not depend on a GPS. Obviously if the unit fails it could mean trouble. Another reason is I feel people spend far too much time looking a screens. From the computer monitor to the cell phone, we are looking at screens all day. When I go hiking, I want to escape from technology. Don't you?
The good news is all my hike descriptions can be followed without using a GPS. In the old days (~1997) I had to watch the file size of the hikes (pdf files). I would have to limit the number of photos. I do not have to do this any longer. Recently I have updated over a dozen hikes with additional photos. Those updates now include a .gpx file for GPS users.
Members of my website can now download 360 hikes from all over the Southwest. That's almost a hike a day! Not a member? Learn more by clicking here.
GPS is very neat to play with but I still wouldn't depend on it. If you want to travel light you have to do the reasonable thing and leave the GPS behind, because the compass and the map are the things that don't fail. Every time I've taken my GPS along I've wound up not using it. Too time-consuming and too intermittent, it would be extra cool to have a track recorded that wasn't a sketchy broken line.
ReplyDeleteI agree. The old timers never had access to a GPS and they did just fine. Thanks for posting.
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