Kiwithrottlejockey
Admin Staff
XNC2 GOD
Posts: 32250
Having fun in the hills!
|
 |
« on: February 19, 2010, 05:07:21 pm » |
|
I was an early user of GPS in the great outdoors (the early hand-held GPS units were bricks — just like the first mobile phones — and were also bloody power-hungry and rather heavy for their size). However, I still used to use the traditional methods for navigation (map, compass, altimeter, the sun and the Mk.1 eyeball) and only tended to use the GPS unit to check up on my navigation in order to see if I was going miles offtrack from where I thought I was meant to be. I never quite trusted GPS units 100%. That was also back when the Americans put a dither code into the signals emitted by GPS satellites so the Russians (and others) couldn't use them to guide missiles.
However, that all changed when I was up the top of the Franz Josef Glacier with three friends and the weather unexpectedly turned to crap big-time. We had gone in there prepared for some bad weather (always a possibility on the high glacier névés in Westland National Park) and had an excess of food, fuel, etc. However, the weather got nastier and nastier and after a few days, we were getting a bit low on supplies. On the daily hut radio schedule (we were holed up in Centennial Hut), we were informed that there was going to be a window for about a day where the wind was going to drop, although it would still be white-out conditions with virtually no visibility. So we sat up half the night plotting a course across the névé that avoided the worst of the crevasse fields and onto the Fritz Range, then along the range to a point where we could down-climb a steep couloir to Castle Rocks Hut, then from there down another steep couloir to the lower Franz Josef Glacier just above the bottom icefall where there are always heaps of people (guided glacier walk groups) and plenty of footsteps in the ice to follow down to the terminal face of the glacier. We loaded the route into the hand-held GPS unit (a labourious task without a computer), then grabbed a few hours sleep before setting out early the following morning and blindly following the route the GPS unit told us to take. It was pretty scarey, because visibility was virtually zero with no surface definition whatsoever of what you were putting your foot on with each footstep foward. However, the GPS unit led us across the névé without any big dramas, onto the apex of the Fritz Range, then along the range until it told us to get off the range to the right, which we did and found ourselves in a steep couloir which we down-climbed, then Castle Rocks Hut appeared out of the clouds and we were virtually home and hosed.
After that, I started trusting GPS units a lot more.
|
