Navigation: Part 2

On the trail

Overall I had no navigation issues worth mentioning, and indeed there were very few places where trail-finding was at all hard. Partly this was a function of generally very good weather.

The exception I offer in support of this assertion comes after Salardu. There is a tricky section bewteen descending off the Marimanya ridge until reaching either the col d'Airoto or the refuge at Gracia Airoto. In poor weather I chose to go direct to the refuge from my campsite (which lay barely 50m off the trail). To do so I made my own rather perilous way down to the lake and around its edge to the refuge. This took some time on the difficult terrain. The route direct to the col did not appear to be any better. From the refuge to the col was straighforward.

The maps were pretty good for 98% of the route. Only rarely was I on a physical track that was not on the map, but I did encounter several places where other paths/roads existed on the ground but not on the map. And they were not especially new. 

It seems completely mean-spirited to complain, after all these are free and cloud sourced maps.
However as a heads up to others I would say:
- Border lines look rather like Trails.
- Trails are usually not named but just called "Trail" or "Unformed Road".
- The main GR routes are not differentiated in any way from minor trails. 

However with the overlay of several coloured GPS tracks and frequent waypoints (eg every col) it is pretty easy to see which trail to take. Occasionally some people followed (or claimed to have done so) some of the borders as if they were trails. Something that looked clearly impossible on the actual terrain! 

The GPS

The eTrex is not a bad bit of kit. It is relatively inexpensive, and feels good in the hand. The button layout is such that it is only really usable in the right hand, but despite being left-handed I was fine with this. I keep it in a pouch on my right pack strap attached by a lanyard which can be unclipped if necessary - useful when you want to use it away from your pack.

However the Garmin hardware is rather let down by buggy and poorly designed software. On one occasion towards the end I had to work around a problem where the tracks (the ones I had loaded from GPX files) were no longer displaying. I managed to get then to display again quite quickly, but am no wiser as to how that happened or if I had hit some undocumented limitation (eg number of tracks displayed at the same time). More annoyingly I often had to refind my destination after powering down and up again.

I am quite comfortable NOT having the touch interface (as I believe this consumes more power) but nonetheless Garmin really needs to seriously lift its game if it wants to remain in this business. Hopefully the pressure of competition from smartphones will force this. On a more positive note I do like the fact that this model can use both GPS and GLONASS satellite constellations, and is usually very quick to get a fix. The heavier, chunkier models such as the Map 62s may have better software, but I have yet to try it.

To build in a little redundancy at no weight cost I carried a second micro SD card with the same maps and GPX files. I had also taken the trouble to convert every trackpoint to a sequentially named POI with a tiny black dot (6 pixels square) as the icon. This meant that even when tracks were not showing on the GPS I could figure out who was going where. Very handy and relatively easy to do once you know what you are up to. GPS Babel is a key tool here.

As for battery life, I finished the first set (which had already been well used) after 10 days. The second set lasted maybe three weeks and at the time of writing I still have three bars left on the last set of batteries. I keep the device off for 95% of the time, using it for perhaps an hour a day in 2-4 minute bursts. I only record waypoints (such as camps and waterpoints) but not tracks. I am careful with my naming conventions, which is important given the sorry search and sort functions in the device.

Paper Maps

I love physical maps (well made ones anyway - ones without a North and no grid/scale drive me nuts). They are perfect for poring over at the planning stage and great for real-world discussions with others. While they require no power they do require looking after. In more than one instance I read of people who had lost their map pouch and had to return to try and find it. So like technological solutions even these simple tools can go wrong.

As I already own all the Topo maps for the Pyrenees (but was separated from them by roughly 18,000km) I wasn't about to buy them all again. So apart from the look and feel nostalgia, what in practical terms did I actually miss by not having them.

1. The ability to scan ahead and plan. In particular to work out how many days it would take. In practice I planned this based on a conservative schedule closer to the 50 day mark than the 28 day one. And as I usually cater for "X days plus 1" per resupply stage, I didn't face any food shortages - indeed if anything the contrary! 

Also I wasn't too fussed to know everything in advance this time. I was prepared to take it as it came. I didn't worry about hours or numbers of metres to climb. What I could have got from the maps might have been some water points, and a better idea of the sort of terrain. Some of the track notes from other people were a good substitute in this regard, which is why I re-read the three main stories as I went along - with much enjoyment I might add.

2. A better overview of the alternatives. Trying to see what the different options are on a small screen is not that easy, and I did no real research on this beforehand when I had a computer screen in front of me. At some stage in the future I'll probabaly have some device with a bigger screen which will help in this regard.

3. Contours and other map info. Contours are always nice to have, if only because it makes the map more alive than a flat one. On the other hand the map won't have the exact location of where other people have been or where they camped. In fact I created a document (it is in my pre-trek bundle) which had this information in a format that could be read from the Kindle and used on a paper map.

4. Showing someone else who can't read a screen. A couple of times I met people who were lost. Showing them anything on the GPS was pretty pointless. They could see it, but they couldn't interpret it. Showing someone on a map is not guarranteed either, but it is a lower hurdle.

5. Aside from the hours that some people put into marking up, photocopying and cutting up their maps to make them as custom and as light as possible, maps are in general ready to use straight out of the box. Whereas I put many hours of research and computer time into preparing my GPS content. Part of that is learning curve I don't have to repeat, but a good chunk isn't.

In the end it is a personal choice. If someone else was carrying my gear and money was not an issue then I'd have both maps and a GPS no question. But with the constraints of weight and money it is for me no contest in the same way that I carry a Kindle not a sheaf of notes and a long novel.