Don’t rely on your phone to get you out of the woods
Smartphone GPS systems work well in the city, but could prove deadly in wild
Sarah Savage was alone in the woods and didn’t know which way to turn. She had been eager to explore the Appalachian Trail when she moved to Pennsylvania and discovered that her house was near an access point. But not long after she took off from the trailhead, the path branched in different directions. She wasn’t carrying a cellphone or a map. Nervous, she turned back.
“I was afraid of getting lost. I didn’t know how to read a map or even that maps existed for where I was hiking,” said Savage, 49, who works in educational publishing.
But she liked the physical and emotional benefits of being out there, so she kept going back. She brought a map and followed the trail as best she could, yet she still felt apprehensive. “I had no sense of direction,” she said. “I wasn’t paying attention to north, south, east or west.”
Navigating is a use-it-or-lose-it skill and one that few hikers, cyclists or walkers employ anymore because of their increased dependence on GPS units, Garmin computers, Google Earth and similar technologies.
According to a 2015 Pew Research Center survey, nine of 10 smartphone owners use their device to get directions or for other locationbased services, up from 74 per cent in 2013. That heavy reliance on devices can give people a false sense of security.
In October 2015, a surveyor found the remains of Geraldine Largay, 66, who was hiking a section of the Appalachian Trail alone in the summer of 2013, stepped off the path and apparently became disoriented.
She tried to use her cellphone to text for help, possibly causing further disorientation, especially if she was moving around while looking at her device instead of her surroundings. But she was in the dense woods of Maine and she couldn’t get a signal. She survived almost a month before dying of exposure and starvation.
Nobody knows how many U.S. hikers get lost each year, according to Robert J. Koester, an instructor for the Virginia Department of Emergency Management and the chief executive of dbS Productions, which conducts search-and-rescue training and publishes related information.
While a database that Koester created shows 24,000 formal searchand-rescue efforts a year, it’s imprecise, he said, given that many hikers get lost for only a short time.
“Many are able to eventually reorient themselves, or are lucky enough to stumble across someone else,” he said. But for some hikers, the wrong turn proves deadly.
Preventing such tragedies is one reason that Stacy Boone teaches land navigation classes through her company, Step Outdoors, which works in southwest Colorado and northern New Mexico. Boone, who says she is a relative by marriage of the 18th-century explorer Daniel Boone, organizes wilderness trips to teach inexperienced hikers and backpackers how to use a map and compass.
She has earned the Triple Crown of Hiking, an award given to people who have completed the Appalachian Trail, the Continental Divide Trail and the Pacific Crest Trail. She says that knowing how to follow a map while traversing a trail, how to orient a map north and how to set a bearing are critical skills that have helped her in forests, mountains, canyons, fields and deserts, no mat- ter how many twists and turns she has taken.
People tend to panic when they’re lost or think they’re lost, Boone said. And panic leads to irrational behaviour.
Her first rule? Just stop. Drink water. Eat a snack. Doing so will help you calm down. It will also help you slow down.
A map is nothing to dread or fear. A map is simply a bird’s-eye view representation, drawn to scale, of a particular area. Topographic maps, which hikers use, typically show major highways, trails, waterways, vegetation (such as forests and meadows) and contour lines that depict elevation. It’s a low-tech version of what so many have come to depend on electronically.
Also, “turn-by-turn GPS (navigation) in which you see only one route and are always going straight ahead” doesn’t teach people to situate them- selves on a route, said Nora Newcombe, a cognitive psychologist at Temple University. Newcombe and her team of researchers are studying why some individuals are more directionally challenged than others. Scientists know that specific types of brain cells — called place cells, grid cells and head-direction cells — support our sense of direction, but that doesn’t explain behavioural differences between one person and another, which is Newcombe’s focus.
While answers are still unclear, “good navigators have better spatial working memories,” Newcombe said, and they anchor themselves in the wider world. For example, she said, they will think: “I was walking toward the lake and I turned left, and then I was walking parallel to the lake even though I couldn’t see it.”
To become a better navigator, pay attention to clues. Is the ground flat or sloped? Note the position of the sun in the sky. Keep an eye out for “handrails,” landmarks that parallel your course, such as a creek to one side.
Visual clues can also help you stay safe and oriented on the trail. Some hikers set their trekking poles out- side their tent at night pointing in the direction they’re supposed to go the next morning, Boone said, while others never hike alone. Some go so far as to place their pack on the side of the trail, tie a string to it and carry the string with them when going off to use the bathroom.
You can also draw an arrow in the dirt at each junction in case you need to backtrack. The arrows serve as a visual record if you get confused or disoriented.
And hikers should always make a plan. “Let someone know you’re going out and when you’ll be back,” said Brian Schachter, an instructor at the Baltimore Chesapeake Bay Outward Bound School. “If you’re not back by that time, they know to contact authorities.”
While it’s smart for hikers to have an inReach or SPOT satellite emergency device — Boone and Schachter carry this piece of gear, which allows a user to trigger an SOS message from anywhere in the world — it’s still vital to know how to read a map.
“My concern is that when people get these devices, there’s an excuse to push the envelope because their confidence isn’t in their skills, it’s in their equipment,” Boone said.
Nine of 10 smartphone owners use their device to get directions or for other location-based services, up from 74 per cent in 2013