Choice of style

Now that I have done it twice, once using refuges and once with a tent and food, I'm in a position to say which I prefer, but can't really recommend either one to someone whose capacity and interests I do not know. 

For me it is now a total no-brainer to go as independently as possible. I slept a whole lot better, and I ate better. Plus I was more intensely and enjoyable engrossed in the hike this way. I was happy to have had a few cabanes which were most fortuitously located just when the weather was at its most miserable. These were all empty except for the same French couple on two occasions. The gites I stayed in were fine and sociable, but I actually failed to get to sleep in either one. The campsites were bearable out of season but would be significantly less appealing at the height of summer.

Navigation: Part 3

Security and Privacy

It is pretty unlikely that this really concerns many people on the HRP, but I'll cover it for completeness.

There is a fundamental difference between using a GPS and using an iPhone (or similar) as a GPS, which has nothing to do with accuracy, interface, or network availability. A GPS is only ever a receiver and a low-power one at that. 

Therefore it cannot send your location to anyone else, now or in the future. Anyone who is close enough to pick up (and interpret) the faint electromagnetic waves from its operation is already as it were "having this conversation face-to-face". 

The only data it records is what you yourself have asked it to store, with the exception of its last known position. We can deduce this as the map first displays this location until it gets a new fix.

So if you do not want the device to hold where you have been do two things:

- Do not store locations or automatically record tracks (there is a setting for this in Setup)

- When in some "neutral" location: Power it on, wait for a satellite fix and then power it off.

My GPS has no locking/PIN mechanism so anyone with physical access to the device can read the data. Any data you have placed on the Micro SD card is also easily readable. 

I added my name and email address to the boot-up screen (there is a text file on the device that you can edit). This is of course optional. It would be useful if you lost your device and it was found by an honest person. You may wish to use an anonymous email address instead of your primary personal one.

Some higher level models of Garmin GPS (eg eTrex 30) can transmit data to another Garmin, but this is another face-to-face operation. Possibly someone has worked out a method to suck data from such a GPS, but it would need to be turned on and at close range. So if you frequently use the GPS to store the locations of buried treasure.

If using an iPhone as a GPS you would be well advised from a purely power consumption point of view to remove the SIM card, but there is still no way for most people to know, even less control, what the device is storing and may choose to send back "home" when it next has connectivity. If you are in an area where there is connectivity and you keep the SIM card in you may wish to consider the advisability (or not) of having others (ie for all intents and purposes the world) know where you are. There is a good discussion on the "Adventure Alan" pages about using the iPhone as a GPS. 

There are some pluses and minuses you must weigh up. For example if you needed to make an emergency call it would be painful (perhaps literally) to have to find and insert the SIM card, and yet having it out makes much more sense in most use cases.

In the context of the HRP this is all probably not much of an issue. All the locations I have stored are ones that I intended to share ab initio. However the wisdom of constantly sharing your present location is something that has received much attention and engendered considerable debate particularly on some of the long trails in the US.

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.

Navigation: Part 1

Tools

I intended to make this a paperless trip, so for navigation, which is a multi-layered activity, my Plan A was a Garmin eTrex 20. This GPS can use data stored on a micro SD card. 

Plan B was a Silva compass and maps on an iPod touch. I used the GaiaGPS app to download the map tiles required and store them on board. These maps have contours but no grid, but can be used without wifi accees. 

The iPod touch does not have a GPS chip, so it is not a perfect plan B it must be said and luckily it was not called for. An improvement would require upgrading to an iPhone, thus giving me a second GPS. Were it were not for the battery power issue I might on accasion promote the iPhone to Plan A. On a short trip this would be feasible.

In addition to the compass, my Suunto watch has an electronic compass and an altimeter. The compass must be recalibrated in each magnetic zone. So probably it is a good idea to recalibrate at the start of every hike. It only takes a minute. It is useful to recheck the altimeter at intervals when at a known height as changes in the weather can affect it.

Preparation

The digital preparation for this trip took longer than the physical preparation. 
There were three main steps:
- Firstly I had to search for the GPS source data and HRP track notes. 
- Secondly I had to manipulate them into a usable format.
- Thirdly I had to load the devices and provide for alternatives in the event of a single failure.

The GPS data consisted of:
- a mapsupp.img file
- GPX files for Tracks
- GPX files for Waypoints
- GPI files for Points of Interest (POI)

The Kindle data consisted of:
- Reference information in spreadsheets that I created and saved as PDFs.
- Reading materials in MOBI (Kindle eBook) format.

Step 1: Source data

I started by looking for GPX files for the route and found several. EveryTrail was one source for these. 

Both A&J and CU kindly provided waypoints for their camping places (as I have now done).
GV generously provided nearly 300 clearly labelled waypoints of places, cols, refuges etc.
In one or two places I might dispute the odd location, but overall it was a terrific job for which I was daily and deeply grateful.

I then looked for blogs which were either useful, interesting or entertaining, and contained information I might need en route. Since 2000 there have been several of these in English and a couple in French. Had I had written one at the time it would have been one of the first in English. 

I read all of these beforehand, but only three on the trail: "Writes of Way", "Chris Upson" and "Touching the Light". All quite different, both from each other and from my own experience, but all the more useful for that diversity. I also read some informative and well written notes from "Self-Powered".

From garmin.openstreetmap.nl I downloaded a mapsupp.img file. I had made a custom tile selection just covering the Pyrenees. I used the Mapnik type option as this produces a more agreeable colour palette. It is very useful to know how to change the internal name of the map (not the same thing as the filename) so that it shows correctly in the device. Otherwise all your maps will be called "OSM Map"!

I also found a couple of useful databases with information on the locations and facilities of Refuges and huts. In practive I found that few were near the route I was following, but if one was spending more time in the Pyrenees these could be very handy. Similar data is available for other areas such as the Alps.

Too many files (both maps and GPX) on a card seems to slow down the boot process of the GPS so I'd recommend keeping what is loaded to the minimum.

Elsewhere I have provided a list of links I used.

Step 2: Conversion processes outlined:

Map: The map file, once renamed internally, is ready to go.

GPX Track files:
- Separate trackpoints from waypoints and put into different files.
- Add altitude information. For this I used a Linux tool called GPS Prune.
- Split tracks into multiple tracks with no more than 500 trackpoints each (to conform to the Garmin limitations - idiotic though they may be). Multiple tracks can still reside within one file.
- Rename tracks (and the files that hold them) using a sensible naming convention.

Waypoints:
- Rename waypoints using a sensible naming convention. 
- Add a comment field to show where they came from.

Points of Interest:
- Convert all trackpoints to POI and save in a file of type GPI. I used a small black dot as the custom icon so these did not use up too much space on the screen.
- Convert POI database information on shelters (Refuges/Cabanes/Abris). There are extensive comments and notes in French.

For the Kindle:
- I reformatted the Track notes and other commentary into MOBI documents using OpenOffice and Calibre.
- I also created PDF versions of OpenOffice spreadsheets, showing stages and resupply points. 
- I converted all the Refuge databases to PDF and saved these using multiple co-ordinate systems so that they could be useful without a GPS.

Step 3: Loading the devices

I do not use any software other than the Linux file system to put data onto the micro SD card. I loaded no data directly to the GPS's internal storage, which was used only for storing waypoints en route. 

On the card in the GPS I put:
- the map
- the tracks of four different groups: A&J, CU, GV (v1 and v2) and HR.
- Within the GPS I set a different colour for each group and quickly got to know who was who.
- The waypoints provided by A&J, CU and GV.
- My own track and waypoints from 2000. 
- The POI files for Refuges and tracks

My own data from 2000 was of little practical use, but of some interest as far as memory is concerned, a subject on which I have commented elsewhere.

To get documents onto the Kindle I used Calibre to email them to my Kindle address. These then appeared in both the Kindle itself and the iPod's Kindle reading app. On the Kindle I organised these into Collections named in such a way that they appreared at the top of my Home screen.

Finally to save anyone who is not technically inclined the effort I have put all these files are in an HRP Bundle. The data I collected en route is in my Post-trip Bundle.

I thought it worth documenting this level of detail as an aid for use on other walks. Below this level it gets quite technical and demands good spreadsheet and data manipulation skills (such as for the conversion from one co-ordinate system to another). Those who can will already know enough to figure out how to do this, and those that can't won't benefit from any further explanation. 

Fuel

There were just two places where I felt I was lucky to get a bottle of Meths (for my alcohol burning stove) - Salardu and Tavascan. My stove can also cope with wood which was my plan B, and can use Esbit tablets. However I didn't have any of these. Half a dozen of these would be a good plan C.

I failed consistently to check on gas supplies as I was not using it myself, and in trying to remember everything else it tended to slip my mind. However others have already done this. My new gas stove is the MSR Superfly which works with both cylinder types and something of that sort would be highly advisable if you did want to use gas. As an alternative ESBIT (I think) make a converter to allow a screw-type head to work on a camping-gaz type canister.

I won't go into all the pluses and minuses of different fuels here, other than to say that for this particular trip I would definitely go with using alcohol again. The new stove and pot system was a major success.

Diet

On the dietary front I made some changes. For starters, by avoiding refuges I was able to stay vegetarian for the entire trail, something that was out of the question in 2000. I reduced my reliance on massive doses of carbs and upped the fat and protein content considerably (mostly with cheese, but also with butter and eggs). Sometimes I was able to cook close to the point of purchase to save some of the weight carried on my back,but of course this initially made no difference to the weight on my legs. I carried more dried fruit and nuts but fewer museli bars. In general I treid to eat less at a time but more often.

Once my initial supply of nice French Bio Muesli was exhausted I switched to bread. The bread in Gavarnie was especially good, but the bread in Spain is generally poor. I always had a healthy supply of biscuits ("Palets Breton") for afternoon tea (a most important and enjoyable moment in the day). Over time I acquired a selection of drinks - black tea, red tea (Te Rojo), Rooibos and hot chocolate. In France I could get real cocoa powder, but in Spain, as usual, there was only a poor subsitute available. Better than nothing at all I guess. A bit of variety is quite important on a long trail*.

Cheese (for those that like it and can digest it) is the one commodity that can be found in remote places at regular intervals. And it is unfailingly excellent.

* My favourite story about food variety comes from NZ. I read there of a pair of hunters who set off for a week or so in the bush. For sustenance they carried only a very large bag of porridge. But for variety they had 8 different food dyes. One for each day of their trip. Sweet as bro!

Resupply

Elsewhere I have recorded the places and the days where I was able to resupply. There was only one place that remains inexplicably (and in my view inexcusably) poor and that is Salardu. It is so badly run it just cries out for competition and replacement. Both seem unlikely to occur any time soon. 

In contrast Tavasacan, while a little more expensive, was adequate to the task and the woman most helpful. Generally I find France is better than Spain for food, particularly if you care about health even a little bit.