AndyP said:I'm more just anti navigation, map study and planning in general. Using maps and following a
specified route is a relatively new concept for me
I used to do that when I was younger. I regularly "explored" the Gower coast without a map, and even
did the same with my first forays into the mountains of South Wales.
Quoted message said:Now that I've got a few years experience of such terrain though I've started to think that using
maps and guidebooks rob you of a sense of freedom and adventure.
Freedom no, adventure perhaps, exploration definitely. Whilst exploring is fun it can often be very
inefficient. You might find yourself walking though really difficult terrain when there's a
perfectly good path 100m away, or you might walk miles into the middle of nowhere to pitch your tent
in a really remote spot, only to find next morning that there's a main road nearby and busloads of
people walking past your tent.
The fact is that the UK has already been explored and mapped so you may as well take advantage of
that. Sure it takes a lot of the mystery out of it, but efficient route planning is so much more,
well, efficient! You can choose the optimum paths, avoid the difficult terrain and locate really
remote spots to pitch your tent. It may be less adventurous, but the scenery is every bit as
dramatic and the experience just as good.
Getting lost, trudging across difficult terrain, making errors of various kinds and suffering
various mishaps all contribute to interesting anecdotes later in life, but at the time they just
aren't much fun, more a time consuming hassle or a really unpleasant experience. I've got plenty of
anecdotes from my younger days and these days I'd prefer to avoid adding more, although that will
undoubtedly continue to happen, because even with planning, experience, maps, GPS etc, things can
still go wrong. The mountains are wild, dangerous places and the weather can be unpredictable and
capricous. Even the most experienced walkers occasionally experience unplanned "adventures".
As for maps and guidebooks robbing you of freedom, perhaps if you follow a walk exactly as it's laid
out in a book, but I for one never do that. Even if I try to follow a route I always end up changing
it. I always prefer to plan my own walks, but even those are subject to change. With a few rare
exceptions I rarely ever do the exact walk that I plan to do. I almost always end up changing the
route as I go, either due to unforseen circumstances (weather changes or out of date map features)
or more often on a whim, depending on how I feel. I don't feel that my freedom to walk where I
choose is compromised by setting out with the *intention* to walk a particular route. Nothing forces
me to follow a route exactly if I don't want to.
Quoted message said:Go on, leave your GPS at home, drive up to Aviemore and go for a wander around the Cairngorm
plateau in the mist. You know you want to.
No, the best advice is to wander around the Cairngorm plateau in the mist, but with a map in your
rucksack and your GPS switched on recording your route. You can still enjoy getting totally lost if
you want, but you'll have the vital equipment necessary to get you back if you really need it. You
can also study the GPS track later to find out where you actually went, rather than never knowing.
Quoted message said:Oh, incidentally the last time I looked at our GPS was to try and use it to measure some of the
routes I use for running but as far as I could tell without the instructions and before something
good came on the telly it only seemed to measure the distance to the next waypoint and not a
simple readout of the distance you've covered.
My GPS (Garmin 12) does give a total distance, but that assumes that you walk in perfectly straight
lines between waypoints, which rarely happens. For that to work you'd need very large numbers of
waypoints in your route to closely follow all the twists and turns. Not only is this not possible in
many GPS units (mine only allows 20 waypoints per route) but it's overkill anyway in practice. A
small number of well chosen waypoints works better IMO. The exact path between key waypoints is
usually irrelevant, so long as you get from one waypoint to the next it doesn't matter how much your
path twists and turns in between.
But to address the matter of measuring a route (not a GPS route), the best way is to use a track.
The easiest is with software (OziExplorer, GPS Utility, Trackmaker? Anquet, Memory Map, Fugawi).
Just draw a track on the map, following all the twists and turns, and it will tell you the distance.
With Anquet and others it will even calculate your ascent and draw a route profile (along with a
Naismith estimate of time taken).
Alternatively you could simply walk the route with your GPS and record a track. The GPS will tell
you how far you've walked if you initialise it before you go, but the track will usually give a more
accurate measurement.
Paul
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The October Project 2003
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