the digital outdoors

Fri, Jan 20, 2012

Time was, I’d have my rucsac permanently packed including a ten year old Kendal mint cake bar squashed in the bottom and a rank orange survival bag which only saw the light of day once on a bivvy trip in the Cairngorms and was therefore never as flat as when it came out of the clear plastic bag it came in. Occasionaly I’d take it out to make sure it was dry and it always stank, curiously, of cat wee. I didn’t have a cat back then. But it did double as an emergency toilet once in the Pyrenees. In the camp site. Next to my tent. Being the victim of severely galloping trots and having failed to make it across the fields to the toilet block I just squatted inside with my head poking out and a very glazed expression on my face. If an alien had landed next to me he’d have legged it back to Andromeda A with tales of a smelly stupid looking, limbless triangular orange species inhabiting that extrasolar planet they’d just discovered. The bag ended up in the skip which was no mean feat considering what it was full of and how high the edge of the skip was. I replaced it. But I digress. The point is that to head for the hills all I had to do was grab the ‘sac, shove a flask and sannies in, pick a paper map from the pile on the shelf and offsky.

Then a few years ago I got into digital maps. Partly because the old eyesight isn’t as good as it once was and you can blow them up while keeping to a scale. I like printing 1:50K at 1:25K. They’re clear as a bell but it means sitting at a computer the night before trying to coax the printer into life then realising there’s no paper or the ink has run out or there’s banding on the map so you need to clean the nozzles. Since when did ‘clogged nozzles’ become part of hill vocabulary?

Then I stupidly got a GPS and time in front of the computer doubled before each trip. I’m not a great fan of tracks. I prefer the odd waypoint in case I can’t be arsed navigating or I’m going to practice navigation and want the gizmo to verify I’m standing at the correct boulder. You can do that with 1:25K maps. So before printing it’s the process of creating waypoints and downloading to the GPS then printing with the waypoints still there in case I forget where they are on the map. Endlessly pulling and pushing the maps in and out of the printing boundary to maximise the useful area. I don’t need that B road on the printout. I’ll have some of that lochan instead. Nah, that crag looks interesting. Maybe I’ll have that in case I fancy coming back that way. Damn, now the start of the route is off the edge. Eventually I’d decide on the right area to print, forgetting it won’t fit into the map case and an inch on one side has to be lopped off. Usually a critical inch of route. And you need a map case as the paper will mulch as soon as you show it water and the waypoints in the GPS are all called WP_0001, WP_0002 coz you forgot to rename them so you’d be left standing in the middle of nowhere with a wet paper ball and a ‘WTF?’ expression.

Eventually it was all done and I’d head up the hill. But then I discovered Harvey Superwalker maps. 1:25K and works of art. Compatible with crap eyesight and they were large enough to cover several hills at once. Something I hadn’t seen in years what with all this digital nonsense. And they had grid lines to boot. That was another bete noir of printed maps. If the area you printed didn’t have the grid numbers on it you’d have to pen them in once it had come out of the printer. So I’d always print a 1:50K larger area too and back to back the printouts in the map case. But Harvey maps took me back to my roots. They are beautiful maps.

But as I revert to medieval technology, so the rise of the machines continues. Hillwalkers now carry several computers instead of rank and inedible accessories. Phones that double as GPS devices and can connect to the internet of all things. I read a report from Oban mountain rescue the other day when two folk got benighted in the Bridge of Orchy hills. They had neither map, nor compass. They didn’t even have head torches but they had a mobile phone capable of connecting to the internet. So they downloaded an app that told them their latitude and longitude which they relayed to the mountain rescue. Just In Time navigation. But that’s the way things are going. This is the first time in the history of the world that the MCofS winter safety list hasn’t mentioned map and compass. GPS and batteries are though.

But I think this takes the biscuit a bit too far. A headtorch with an operating system that you program? The Petzl Nao has a ‘reactive’ beam. You don’t control what you see any more. It controls what you see depending how you programmed it. There prolly is some way to override it but if you need to do that you prolly wouldn’t buy one. Time was, when you needed to see you whipped out the old Petzl and twisted the knurled plastic until you could see what you wanted to see. That’s if the silver reflector behind the bulb hadn’t peeled off or the bulb hadn’t blown. Do hillwalkers use that word now? Blown? The only thing that blows on the hills now is the wind. The wind of change. Lighting your way is automatically handled for you by the computer strapped to your head. But don’t forget to plug it into the mains the night before, while you’re creating your tracks and printing your carefully formatted map. In fact you can just plug it into the computer as it has a USB charger but it’ll have to fight the GPS for space, unless you have a USB hub as the phone will want to suckle too.

The only time you had to spend preparing in the ‘old days’ (get aff ya auld fart!) was Thursday night down the pub with the club. Sorting out transport and which routes to climb or hills to wander. There’s an apochryphal tale told of the Orion MC (nee Clachaig MC) when ‘Uncle Fester’ went down the pub one Thursday night and Brian the physics teacher was there. Brian asked, ‘fancy the Alps?’. Fester replied ‘ok’ and they jumped on Brian’s motorbike and off they went. These days you’d have to decline as the headtorch would be programmed for a walk in the forest, the GPS datum would need changed to something other than OSGB and Anquet don’t cover the Alps so you’d need to pull out the phone and fire up the Amazon app to see how much the paper maps were.

Stuff that I say. Where’s my rank bivvy bag?