Considering ditching smart watch for field watch for future backpacking trips

I’ve had the Fenix 7 Pro for about 6 months. Stopped using my Apple Watch because of the charging hassle, and couldn’t be happier with the long battery life. I wear it all the time and charge it about once every other week.

I haven’t been able to go backpacking yet this year so no direct experience there. I do have an InReach Mini mainly for messaging, and almost always use it with the app on my smartphone. To be honest I use other apps for mapping data like distance, location, etc.  Personally I’m fine with this amount of data usage.  For my typical less-than-a-week trip, I need to charge the phone, but not the watch or InReach.  The more you use the phone and InReach of course the more often you will need to charge them.

If you are seeking more disconnection, I would definitely ditch the Apple Watch.  There are nice automatic watches from Vaer and others (I used to be a nice watch guy before switching over to  my first Apple Watch years ago).  However, I would probably get my old solar Cassio out of the drawer if it was just for time of day.

I use the Garmin at home mainly for timers, alerts and alarms. I track my walk distances, and take a passing look at pace, steps and sleep score, but hardly ever analyze the data after the fact. I might be more interested in the after a backpacking trip.

Dedinitely following to hear other takes

Bulova Caravelle, a Walmart cheap but bombproof watch.
Steven M

“For my typical less-than-a-week trip, I need to charge the phone, but not the watch or InReach.  The more you use the phone and InReach of course the more often you will need to charge them.

If you are seeking more disconnection, I would definitely ditch the Apple Watch….”

If the Apple watch doesn’t require charging, why not have it?

better to lose the phone. Lose all electronics and the need to carry charging capacity and suddenly–you’re back to the original “light” idea. “Light” isn’t jsut about pounds and ounces. “light” is also about leaving off the world and connecting with nature as a means of connecting with oneself. “light” is also about trust: I can go out into the wild and things will work out, if I know what I’m doing and paying attention. Distractions are the burdensome enemy.

I thought I’d hate the garmin instinct but love it on trail.  Battery life is much improved over any map based watch and you can zoom out on your route to get relative bearing and see your overall route.  It also has features like sighting a landmark  then tracking to it, a great feature for on trail changes,  Swiss army knife, amazing tech and battery life

Curiously, the only time I wear a watch is while backpacking. It’s a simple, reliable Casio.

After very many years, I have a better sense of my speed, adjusted for terain/altitide, but a poorer sense of time elapsed. Having a wrist watch reduces my frequency for consulting less accessible mobile phone and InReach Mini to assess both time and position.

I don’t want/enjoy training and competition info on my wrist; but throw no shade on folk who find joy in that.

David, does you garmin instinct do anything that an in reach is unable to do? Just curious.

I wear a basic g-shock (the original rectangular 5600 style). I don’t personally feel the need to know my mileage, elevation change, etc. And certainly not in real time.

I use the watch to know the time of day, for curiosity, and also because it can help me keep track of rough distance for route-finding. I also use it to time rehydration of freeze dried meals and things like that. On very rare occasions, I set a timer or alarm. It has a backlight, which can be useful sometimes.

Joey, I use the Garmin Messenger and its UI is clumsy so never use it for anything but messaging, weather and SOS back up.  Sorry, don’t know the Inreach’s ins and outs.

Another vote for a version of the Garmin Instinct. Lots of features. Most of my Inreach messaging is done with the watch, don’t even have to use my phone except for custom messages.

I like to keep my steps and vertical feet tracked because it’s a motivator for getting out more each day and also a reminder of “What was that 5,000 vertical foot day last January? Oh, yeah, my GCNP trip.”

But other than that and my phone as a camera?  I only want GPS on cold, windy, cloudy, trail-less volcanos like Adak, not on a trail system.

So on the trail (and now around town), I’ve gone back to a wrist watch for time, time-to-sundown, WTF time is it? when I roll over at night, and for navigation.  Navigation example: the next trail junction is 5 miles and 1,000 feet up.  So I’ll get there in 2 hours and should start looking around 1:45.  By 2:20, I probably missed it.

Also, my stock answer to “How much further is it?” is “It took me 35 minutes to get here from there (“. . . but I was going downhill” or “I travel very light”) and a wrist watch makes that easy.

Then, to “track” my steps and vertical, I just “add data” in the app, since the trail miles are on the paper map / trail signs.  I already do that, because my phone cheats me out of some of the vertical feet so I’m already adding data to true it up.

I have skinny wrist for my height, and that allows me to use the smaller, LIGHTER women’s version of the same sports watch with the same features.

Mostly, I bring an analog watch, but if I absolutely positively have to get up and hiking at a particular time to make a shuttle or a flight, I bring a digital watch with an alarm function.

I still have my phone with me – it just does so much stuff in a pinch, but turned off and in my pack.  And use it in airplane mode for photos.  That way, it lasts a week without needing a battery bank.

Being an old guy and waking more during the night (and wondering what time it is), cheap Timex watches with their “Indiglo” feature (tap to backlight the face) are very convenient.

My neutral focus without glasses is reading distance, which is convenient.  My wife either has her contacts in and struggles with reading or not and is blind so the “Easy Reader” versions help, some of which come with Indiglo.

I’ve never taken to smart watches (or much of smart anything, for that matter).  Several years ago I bought a Vaer S3 Calendar watch, and I love it.  It is simple and functional, and relatively inexpensive for a field watch.  They have recently sponsored an episode of  two of the BPL podcast, which is cool.  Only minor drawbacks; the luminescence is weak, so the watch is not easy to read in the dark, and the calendar date is tiny and difficult for my old eyes to see.

I was in the same boat…I just wanted to know what time it was and wanted to be able to see it in the middle of the night so I knew if it was 3:00 am and I should get up to pee or if it was 6:00 am and I’d be getting up shortly anyway.  I bought an Armourlite Isobrite Valor T100 on Drop and the tritium blue lights are very visible at night.  Any time I pull it out of my drawer I smile because I only wear it when hiking and putting it on means I’ll be on a trail soon.

Kevin: I’m glad to see tritium illumination is making a comeback.  I had a Casio(?) in the 1980s that had a tritium/phosphorous cell behind the display.  It worked perfectly in all light conditions – in daylight, the LCD worked like any other.  In twilight, the tritium backlight added some illumination.  In the dark, it glowed brightly enough to (barely) make out printing on a map or label.  But at this point, almost 4 half-lives later, it would be only 1/16 as bright.

None of my skin cancers have been on my left wrist, so I guess the radiation exposure wasn’t very high.

A companion with an Apple watch reminds of my hiking buddy in the 1970s who insisted on using contact lens.  It was almost like bringing a pet along – the amount of care & feeding they required.  Separate disinfection solution, storage solution, having to boil them each night, a panic around every dusty gust of wind, etc.

I guess they’re really cool to have (and I’ll admit that having an EKG machine on your wrist is amazing), but I haven’t taken the plunge, so the struggles to keep it charged are kind of annoying.

The heart rate monitor is handy, objective confirmation of when it’s time to throttle back on long days.  The beauty is these things take seconds to use, almost no care and feeding if using a MIP display type and loading routes at home (which is easy)

I upgraded from a cheap illuminated watch to a simple ABC Suunto Core a few years ago and really like being able to check my altitude on long climbs, esp. off trail. This really helps me know where I am and with the time check, figure out how long until I get to a spot. But the barometric altimeter is not as precise as the GPS on my iphone UNLESS atmospheric conditions interfere, in which case the ABC can be better, but that is rare. GPS is king; but pulling out the phone to check location, esp. when I do that often in dicey situations, is a hassle, so I’m leaning toward upgrading to the Garmin Instinct myself. I already know I won’t use most of its data collection, so I certainly don’t need the Fenix, and the Apple watch strikes me as a front country tool. But to have a quick look at staying found on a wristwatch GPS seems like it might be worth it.

I also have a small wrist and prefer not to cuff myself with a monster watch face. So the women’s version seems to be worth a look as well.

Timex Expedition with Indiglo backlight. Battery lasts ~5 years. Nothing to charge. Been using these for 20+ years. I don’t carry anything else that needs a battery except for a P&S camera occasionally.  I’m with @jscott on this.

Forgot to mention, the Instinct has been great for tracking pace over varied terrain and conditions.  I’ve run it over multiple trips now and this is proving handy for planning future trips, where to plan water takes etc.

I quit wearing a watch after I shorted out a power supply and burned a crater in my arm

I mostly used  a timex expedition, one of the simpler  timex triathlon, or a a basic Casio until 15 years ago when I purchased my first Garmin Tri watches (I think it was a 905).  Since then I have stuck in the Garmin world because I found the data quality better than most everyone else, and the battery life has been good enough.

I will sometimes have the GPS turned on, but typically I use the step count, time.  and the barometric altimeter give me a sense of progress while preserving the battery.  I find the heart rate tracking very useful.

There are “S” versions which are a bit smaller.  I wonder if the 255S might work for many people who aren’t look for lots of features.

I have had the Suunto Vertical Solar for a few weeks now and am blown away. I switched from the Ultra because I hated the battery life. I charged my Suunto the day I got it about a month ago, have been on a 5 day trip where I frequently turned on the maps, two day hikes I tracked full GPS mode and a couple runs. I am now at almost a month since charge and I am at 44% battery. I could not be happier. I replaced it with a velcro and its crazy comfortable.

I switched from the “original” Garmin Instinct to a digital watch for the same reason, I hated charging it daily on trail.  After a year or so I found I missed the ability to track distance without having to reach for my phone (i.e. a water source or trail intersection is 3.5 miles ahead, used my watch to quickly glance at distance without overshooting the spot).

I ended up buying the Garmin Instinct 2 Solar and have been pretty happy.  I have it configured in a way that the only notification that comes through from my phone is a call (no messages or other notifications).  Battery life during normal daily use is probably between 1 and 3 weeks, depending on how often I’m tracking runs or other GPS activities.  On trail I have to charge every other or third day.

I do enjoy having it set up as a “basic” watch that happens to track hiking metrics and my heart rate, it’s also nice having the ability to configure the screens for various activities differently.

Turning off Bluetooth on the Instinct 2 gives it notably more battery life. I place the option in the quick menu

Tracking at the default gps interval gives days but the gps interval can be extended to get much better battery life

I’ve worn this Victorinox “Basecamp” daily for 20 years – it keeps nearly perfect time and is indestructible. It’s also incredibly comfortable to wear, being relatively thin and contoured. It’s all I need in the backcountry. If I were to replace it I’d probably look at Vaer.