One day when I was a teenager my dad, who worked for the Forest Service and whose job it was to mark off timber sale boundaries, brought me to work with him. I don't remember why, but I guess it was one of those "take your kid to work" days or something. At the time I was more interested in reading Heinlein and thinking up new adventures for our role-playing game club at school than tromping around the forest with my father. So, needless to say, I was a less-than-enthusiastic ride-along partner.
After an hour of paperwork and office talk we loaded up a bunch of gear into a green Forest Service truck and drove out into the middle of the forest on a network of seemingly random logging roads. When we finally got to the proposed timber sale, which looked like any other patch of impenetrable eastern arizona forest, we set off into the tangle of trees on foot. Keep in mind that this was raw, virgin forest filled with huge old-growth douglas fir and spruce. The canopy overhead was so thick you couldn't see through it to the sky and the forest floor was such a tangle of brush and downed trees that it was impossible to walk ten feet in a straight line without having to veer around some obstacle. Think of the forest around the Humphreys Trail on the San Francisco Peaks and you'll have a pretty good idea of what I'm talking about.
It was then that my dad showed me the most amazing feat of old-school orienteering that I've ever seen. Even the land-nav instructors I met in the Army could never have matched it. We spent the rest of the day navigating through this impenetrable mess to precisely predefined locations specified by the timber sale prescription, measuring off various distances down to the foot, and marking trees with spray paint and ribbons. Not once did we get lost. And at the end of the day after hours of transecting the sale back and forth in big loops and figure-eights we not only found our way back to the truck but we did so from a different angle and were only off by a few feet or so.
All of this was done without the aide of a GPS receiver, which, if they existed at all at the time, would've been the size of a jeep and decidedly not portable. My dad's tools were a map, a compass, and sometimes a really long tape measure, although mostly he just counted paces. Hours later, when I saw that green Forest Service truck appear like magic out of the thick trees exactly where my dad said it would I was just floored. It was incredible and maybe a little uncanny, too. To modify Clarke's famous saying: Any sufficiently advanced skill is indistinguishable from magic.
So, Sunday when I noted that my Garmin eTrex GPS had lost its satellite lock yet again in the trees I decided that I wasn't going to carry the damned thing on my birding expeditions anymore. Not only is its battery seemingly always dead but in all the many hikes I've been on this year and last I can't think of a single instance when I really needed to know my location down to ten foot accuracy. Also, it's utility has diminished somewhat since I don't geocache any longer. Instead, in the future I'll do as my dad did: use my mind, a map, and a simple compass to find my route. Maybe I'll get lost, maybe I won't. But it'll be interesting and maybe we'll learn something.
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