Navigation

You might think that, for all the other challenges involved in a thru-hike, the PCT is pretty easy to navigate. It's one long line, after all, a path between two points, and you're standing on it. Follow the trail. Head north.

white blaze

Actually, from what I've read that's a pretty accurate assessment of the Appalachian Trail. It's very well-marked. A rectangular white blaze flags a rock or tree at every junction or hesitation, indicating the way. Carrying an elevation profile might help you organize your days, but a thru-hiker wouldn't necessarily need maps, they're more a point of interest, a way of interacting with the surroundings. Like a bird book. It'd be hard to get lost along that long green tunnel unless you went blundering blindly into the woods on purpose.

Partly because many hikers come to the Crest after completing the AT, therefore, both the official and cottage-industry publications about the PCT state loudly and repeatedly, "This trail is different, folks. YOU NEED MAPS." No white blazes. Frequently no signage at all. Junctions, jeep roads, snow fields, washouts, wildfires, even boring plant overgrowth might obliterate parts of the trail, demanding route-finding or (sometimes) a detour. Owing to the fact that the PCT often traverses much deeper wilderness than the AT, too, the stakes are a bit higher if you mistakenly head off in the wrong direction. You must have a way to navigate.

For a long time the Wilderness Press guidebooks provided navigation by narration. Experienced thru-hikers described the features of the trail with real words strung together into sentences, printed on paper and bound into books. New editions appeared periodically. (None recently.) The Data Book condensed this meandering discourse into a mathematical "crib sheet" of waypoints, indicating the locations of pertinent landmarks (road crossings, water sources, towns) by calculating the milages between. Good old Forest Service and USGS maps provided topographical details when the trail was snowed under (if you know how to read them). GPS appeared on the scene for the wealthy or the worried. Yogi started publishing her Town Guide in 2007, including not only updated information about the trail itself, but valuable notes on the types of resupply available in each town: perennial trail angels, where to do laundry, where to get fuel, addresses, phone numbers, and operating hours of post offices, stores, motels, and restaurants. The paper-weight for all this information adds up, of course. By long-standing tradition, thru-hikers cut their guidebooks into pieces, carrying only the pertinent pages for a given section, burning them as they go.

Then Apple invented the iPhone.

Within the span of a few years, it's become possible to consolidate camera, GPS, compass, altimeter, cellphone, alarm clock, timer, personal computer, data books, journal, auxiliary flashlight, endless entertainment--iTunes! YouTube! Hulu!--and god knows what else into one very tiny package. You can Skype with your mother and order new socks from the top of Mt Whitney. Even in areas without cell service, you can still take pictures, record your thoughts, listen to music, and navigate with a single device that weighs less than a paperback book. Solar chargers have attained an efficiency and reliability to allay any worries about running out of power. As long as you don't drop it during a stream crossing, the iPhone is probably the best thing that ever happened to ultralight backpacking.

A few years ago a hiker called Halfmile, armed with a GPS, mapped the length of the PCT with exceptional care and precision, then made the maps available online, in pdf form, for free--which is to say, you can download and print the most current and reliable maps ever made of the trail from home, if you like. That's pretty amazing. Still more amazing, you can download those maps into your smartphone. Halfmile's even developed an iPhone app with the PCT waypoints--practically a living guidebook. Paul's got the latest and greatest iPhone 5, so when he arrives at a confusing junction, he'll be able to consult the waypoints or digital maps and proceed without ever having had to resort to a paper printout.

I don't need or want a smartphone in my daily life, so I don't have one. (Call me backward, but I could make lists of the things I would rather invest my time and money in: Chickens. A KitchenAid. Flying lessons. A thru-hike.) When I realized how many devices I might wind up carrying on this trip for communication purposes, however, I issued a general plea for a used smartphone, and Silas very generously mailed me his old iPhone 3G. Thus armed I should be able to take snapshots, read email, order socks, and call my mother.  I haven't yet figured out how to write a blog post, but I'll get there. The one thing I've discovered this smartphone absolutely cannot do, ha ha, is navigate. I can't download any pathfinding app currently on the market, because the operating system is too old. I might be able to manage pin-drop emails with Google Maps to let my folks know where I am, but the GPS won't be able to help me much on-trail. They hadn't even developed an internal compass for this model.

Which is fine, because I ordered paper maps. All 474 pages of them. Old school.

trimming maps to make them fit in ziploc bags
photo by Paul

I like maps. I've got maps hung all over my house--of the world, of Alaska, of Antarctica, of New Zealand--marked with dots and lines. Maybe it's my way of organizing information and memory. I feel kind of defensive about taking maps on the PCT in this digital age, but carrying paper maps doesn't strike me as any more ridiculous than carrying camp shoes. HYOH, right? Besides, they're so pretty.

(Future hikers, please note that a printshop in Portland called GISI will produce every last one of Halfmile's maps, in full color, double-sided, for $70 plus shipping. It took me awhile to learn this, and maybe I can spare someone else a bad day by passing the message along. The local printshop, by comparison, quoted me $414 for the project; FedEx Kinko's wasn't far behind; UPS wants $0.50 per page.)

ley lines

I've divided my enchantingly lovely topo maps into packets, with correlating pieces of Yogi's Town Guide and the Data Book, to join the appropriate maildrops. This is probably overkill. If anything gets tossed, the Data Book, somewhat dated and the hardest for me to make sense of (it's all numbers, gah), will go first. I'll pitch "spent" pages of both books as I pass through each town. But I really don't want to have to burn the maps. They're too nice. I've an idea about keeping notes on them and sending them home again in sections.