Why it’s best not to rely on cellphone navigation when hiking

Roger

Methinks you protest too much.

I was responding to your post above that stated you didn’t use GPS because cell coverage was poor where you walk. I was merely pointing out that this is a misconception, and with the right preparation you don’t need any reception at all.

Your description of GPS usage is just a caricature. You present GPS use as some kind of binary scenario where people rely entirely on GPS with no maps or navigation skills – but no-one experienced actually uses it like this. As I’ve been arguing, it’s about finding the right balance between GPS and conventional navigation for the project in hand. Sure, GPS has its limitations in certain scenarios, but so do maps, especially in featureless areas or in countries like Spain and Italy where mapping is poor.

None of your objections hold any water if you see GPS as part of a balanced approach to navigation which you adapt to the conditions.

I’m not going to respond point-by-point, but here’s a couple of issues I couldn’t let go unchallenged:

Why bother to go out walking if you are going to stare at your phone the whole time to stay within a metre of your route?

Yeah – that’s really what people do… Please let’s be serious. You could equally argue that maps are dangerous because people will bury their heads in them and not look where they are going. This is just silly. On the other hand, being able to locate yourself to within a couple of meters can be literally life-saving when you’re aiming for a small gap between corniced cliffs in a whiteout – something that’s relatively common in areas like the Cairngorms and Ben Nevis in Scotland.

I thought that your point about weather reports being useless was particularly ill-considered. For example, last time I was in the Alps I was getting an uneasy feeling about the weather. I was on a long unsupported leg in the elbow season and hadn’t seen a forecast in days. When I got reception I saw a red warning for a catastrophic 100 year storm. This confirmed that I should bail out of my route and run for safety. If I’d carried on I’d have been trapped with low supplies in a remote area with all the bridges washed away…

Sure, serious walkers have managed without GPS for centuries. They also managed with heavy canvas tents, huge brass stoves, nailed boots and fur blankets. You would never argue that we should all go back to those days. People like us who have moved to lightweight gear know that used with skill and discretion it can enhance our experience in the hills. When you talk about GPS, you sound like those old fogies who argue that you should never venture into the back country without a stout pair of steel shanked leather boots.

I was asked about a cheap phone for back country GPS. My personal preference is for a rugged phone that will work in cold, wet and with gloved hands.

The hard-core lightweight option would be something like the Cubot KingKong Mini:

https://www.cubot.net/smartphones/king-kong-mini/

Weight around 120g/4.2oz.

In the UK I can pick it up from a reputable retailer for £79.95 – around $USD 104.

Like any lightweight gear it has its limitations, but it’s reasonably rugged and perfectly usable for navigation. The screen is small at just 4″, but this means it’s much less likely to break than a larger screen, reducing the most common point of failure.

You can pick up full-sized Chinese rugged phones for just a little more, and they will have full military specs and big, long-lasting batteries at a weight of around 240 grams. Spend a bit more than double this and you can get a very capable phone that can even handle some 3D gaming, if that floats your boat.

With light use the batteries will last for days or even weeks. But always-on GPS tracking is a battery hog – so for multi-day use you’d want to turn this off.

You can spend a lot more than this on western branded rugged phones, but they’re made in the same factories and don’t seem to be any better built. So all you’re really gaining is a better local guarantee.

There’s also an increasing range of waterproof and dustproof mid-market smartphones which might work if you put them in a rugged case. Avoid anything with a trendy glass back – too fragile for our requirements.

There is absolutely no need to be buying one of those $1000+ flagship phones – they are just for fashion victims or for someone who absolutely needs a high end camera in their phone. And their fancy bevel-less screens are very vulnerable. You can get 90% of the functionality for under a quarter of the price.

OK here’s my question.  Must one have a carrier account to use the phone with Gaia as a gps? After all it works in that capacity just fine without any service whatsoever. The signals are coming from a series of satellites, not from or through your cell service provider. Say you had like an older S-5. Could you unlock it, clear out all the bloat-ware and just use it as a camera and gps? Love that swappable battery

obx hiker,

I’m think on any unlocked phone/tablet with GPS the GPS will work without a SIM card. It does on my phone (Sony Xperia compact) anyways. So if you have wifi you can download all the maps before you go on a trip then just go out without any other connection. You should still be able to make emergency calls (911) as well. I would test the GPS before going out into the wilderness on any new device. A phone locked to a specific carrier may not even unlock without a sim card, so I wouldn’t bother to try with that. I have an old LG G2 that doesn’t unlock unless I have a SIM card in it.

OK boomer

back to the more pressing issue of the impending apocalypse

I am simply astounded how people who argue against the use of GPS make it sound like it has to be an either/or proposition.  It doesn’t.

I’m a total map geek.   Every year I volunteer to teach a map & compass navigation class through my local outdoors club, and  I regularly participate in orienteering meets through my local orienteering club.

However, I also own several standalone GPS units, going back to B&W only models from Lowrance, ( who eventually dropped out of the market and decided to focus on fishing electronics).  I had one of the first consumer handheld GPS receivers that was an add-on module for Handspring/Palmpilot devices.   The mapping capabilities were rudimentary to say the least and it ate AAA batteries like crazy.  I used it for about a year to find geocaches in my area. At the time, it was the only handheld GPS device that allowed easy transfer of waypoints from a computer.

In addition to the standalone GPS, I’ve had copies of the Caltopo, Gaia, GutHook, and BackCountry Navigator apps on my phone.

I’ve also owned a Caltopo Pro account since at least 2014, which is the oldest stored map listed in my account.

I’ve been on Mt Olympus in Washington State in July with a self-led mountaineering group in extremely poor visibility, when our rope leader almost walked us off a cliff/cornice, because they didn’t follow a good compass bearing.   I also once got separated from the rest of my group coming down Mt Rainier from Camp Muir to find the boot track disappeared into melting snow.  I was surrounded by clouds, wondering which way to turn and unable to see any visible landmarks that could be found on a topo map.  A working mapping GPS would have been extremely useful in both of these cases.

I’ve also seen GPS used poorly or fail.  I was playing with an older GPS in northern Michigan forest when the position jumped 100’s of meters back and forth due to poor satellite lock.  This was 10+ years ago.   More recently, I’ve had fellow hikers insist we must be on the wrong trail (in the High Sierra) because the Gaia GPS showed their position about 50 meters north of the marked trail.  There were no other trails for miles!

I also know the physical limitations of my phone.  It’s the first gen Google Pixel, so the battery is now older.  If I go out for a jog in cold weather and use it to listen to music with earbuds, an 80% battery can die in less than an hour.

I don’t mind bringing along GPS tech and using it as my backup.  I still carry a paper map, which is usually a custom one I’ve built up using Caltopo and had printed locally onto 11×17 paper.  Their map data layers are excellent, and I can add routes, waypoints, and waypoint annotations to my heart’s content.  I’ll carry that paper map, my compass, and also download the GPX route and waypoint information to my GPS (whether that be Gaia or my Garmin).   99% of the time, I’m completely capable or pulling my map out of my pants pocket and locating myself on it.  The GPS is REALLY nice to have for that 1%, where I have some doubt about my EXACT location and want verification.

On my JMT hikes, GPS has been really nice as a means of easily locating documented campsites along the trail.  It’s not something I’ve done during trips to the Winds, but on the JMT, the convenience of seeing where I was relative to campsites documented in Elizabeth Wenk’s JMT guidebook was extremely handy.

I discourage people from using GPS as their primary means of wilderness navigation, but at the same time, I highly recommend people learn how to use it as a backup in the form of a GPS app on their phone.  Most modern hikers are carrying their phone as a multi-use device anyway, and MANY modern hikers aren’t as strong with map & compass as they should be.  It beats getting lost and calling for search and rescue.

As long as I am on your team Mike, bring it on…

And I must say, I’m not very familiar with this world in which all of one’s intelligence, skills, and experience suddenly fly out the window simply because you check a waypoint or drop a pin on a smartphone map….

“So please don’t respond to the following with ‘OK Boomer.’ ”

Uh oh, no offense intended, mostly just humor.  I’m a boomer

I think there is a full range of strategies in this thread so anyone can read them and try out different strategies and use what works for them.  No reason for anyone to insult anyone else for offering a different opinion.  No idea is bad or wrong.  I don’t need to defend my opinion…

I think that population wise, there are a lot of people that didn’t grow up with smart phones and have resisted transitioning, but when they did, they realized that smartphones are quite useful.  I am one of those people.

For years I used paper maps.  That works.  A little more reliable.  I got a laser jet printer and that ink is waterproof, I used to use an inkjet printer but the ink runs when wet.  Thinnest possible paper.  Put it in a gallon ziploc bag so it only rarely gets a drop of water on it.  Use caltopo or whatever to get USGS maps.  Or maps from somewhere else.  Edit the jpg file and crop a page worth and print it.  I hate huge margins so I try to reduce those.  I’ll write on mileages of trail segments, or mileage from the trailhead.  I still take a paper map but mostly just use it at camp, plotting the next day.

I’ve never been a huge gamer, but looking at a gps map on the smartphone is sort of like playing a computer game.  You can see where you are and where’ve you been.  As Roger warned, you don’t want to be staring at your phone and walk off a cliff : )

Same thing with camera.  I was composing a picture, walked a bit to get a different view.  Almost stepped off a cliff.

Comcast wireless is $12 a month for several phones.  As long as you use less than 1G of data.

I use wifi which doesn’t count.  One month I thought I was using wifi, but it had decided not to connect so I was using cell.  I had to pay $25 for that month.  Now I set the warning limit to 0.5G so it’ll tell me if it chooses not to connect to the wifi.

Add that SAR in the US tends to be uneven, .. and, buried mid-article, part of the increase in SAR calls are cellphone reliant hikers losing battery power:

https://www.outsideonline.com/2407811/search-and-rescue-america-overwhelmed?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=onsiteshare

(Let’s stir this pot even more…)

those damn young people and their cell phones, they will certainly be the ruin of our existence

and then, it all comes down to this

Add that SAR in the US tends to be uneven, .. and, buried mid-article, part of the increase in SAR calls are cellphone reliant hikers losing battery power:

https://www.outsideonline.com/2407811/search-and-rescue-america-overwhelmed?utm_medium=social&utm_source=email&utm_campaign=onsiteshare

Awesome article, I didn’t know most SAR is entirely volunteers.

.. “Meanwhile, some SAR leaders report changes in the kinds of rescues they’re doing: there are more Instagramming adventurers getting in over their heads, more mushroom hunters in flip-flops losing their way in the woods, and more people navigating with their phones until the battery dies.”

Lines up with the rest of this thread, don’t go anywhere unprepared. It’s always been a problem and probably always will be.

This yes: don’t go anywhere unprepared. It’s always been a problem and probably always will be.

However, social media and cell phones have combined to create the sense for some people, especially those who are new to hiking, that they *are* prepared, even if they’re not. “Don’t bother to bring maps” – or raincoats, or whatever, it’s an “easy” or “well marked” trail, when it isn’t, lots of bad advice all over the place. Just as people are not able to filter fake news, many cannot filter out who knows what they’re talking about and who’s just having fun on social media but is utterly clueless. I see comments about hikes that the commenter hasn’t even done! They just figured they’d join in the discussion because…

And no one is using guide books, which were once vetted at least by publishers and fairly reliable if not current. So the new hiker takes bad advice, and figures the cell phone is the insurance policy. The phone also creates the illusion that things will happen fast. I like Roger’s “sit down and have a cup” advice, to avoid panicking and doing silly things. Patience, waiting, thinking. And only then, acting – whatever the situation, whether it’s crossing a sketchy river, getting lost, or waking up in total whiteout.

BPL and other sites are helpful but what is our demographic? Most younger, newer hikers are on Instagram and Twitter, not BPL. Am I wrong?

@ Joshua: Thank you for that useful information: New life for older phones!

Thanks for that cubot tip Geoff. I’d found the “regular’ sized King Kong and another one Ulephone? or Blackwell? with a 13,000 Mah battery. Course it weighs over 13 ounces. I think Blackwell had a video touting their model for survival, millennial apocalyptic, thunderdome type situations and part of the pitch was you could always throw it at your gladiatorial opponent; or maybe a bear. Yeah!

Jerry:  thanks for the tip about Comcast. And hey you can spray those paper maps with like silicon DWR type stuff. Just stay up-wind of the spray!

Jeff you pretty much covered it; along with Sam. Lots of similar experiences. And I’ve not yet been able to reliably locate backcountry or off-trail campsites in the Winds, even rather exhaustively using google earth and maps for the 3-D views. You just have to look around and find a flatish spot that isn’t where the water will settle. Easy haha, oh yeah and stay X feet from the trail and X feet from a stream or lake, both of which are conveniently, and naturally situated in the flatish terrain.   But you know what? looking for them is one way to get really familiar with the terrain.

Good points Karen. I was wondering if the dis-connect  (well sort of a dis-connect)  also has something to do with primarily using mobile phones for all computing as opposed to work-stations, Lap-tops or something at least tablet sized or larger.

I’ve got a few good Murphy’s Law type stories involving inadequate navigational preparation and/or hiking hubris.

@Geoff
your post above that stated you didn’t use GPS because cell coverage was poor where you walk.
A small correction. I NEVER said that.
I don’t use a GPS because I don’t need one.
I don’t use maps on phones because I prefer LARGE paper maps.
Impending storms: very often around here there is nowhere to run to.
But thank you for the URL. Interesting.

Cheers

Roger

Perhaps you misspoke, but what you wrote above was

” I don’t own a smart phone. And where we usually go walking, there is little or no signal anyhow.”

That’s why I felt it was worth explaining to people that perhaps aren’t familiar with the technology that you don’t need a signal to use GPS in remote areas.

@HkNewman

You’re suggesting that rescues are rising because cellphone reliant hikers are running out of battery power. But you’d surely have to dig deeper into the figures to understand the implications.

Clearly, if they are running out of battery with no alternative navigation to fall back on they are fundamentally incompetent. The problem isn’t the GPS – it’s the fact that they are lacking skill and judgement.

You could just as easily argue the opposite. We all know that in many types of country traditional map and compass navigation is a challenging skill that many hikers haven’t developed.

A particularly sad example is the Geraldine Largay fatality discussed above. When you look at the map, it’s quite remarkable that she didn’t manage to navigate herself to safety given that she had a 2000 mile gathering feature on one side (the AT) and a stream catchment that led to safety on the other. Clearly she had zero navigation skills. But if she’d been carrying Gaia or Guthook she would have extracted herself in minutes, saving her life and saving the SAR volunteers 1000s of hours. There must be countless examples of incompetent parties being saved by their phones when they would have got into trouble with map and compass.

It’s not as though people didn’t get lost in the hills before GPS came along. It doesn’t change the basic fact that competent people will usually be OK, while incompetent people are at greater danger, whatever the technology they are using.

@Geoff

Ah yes, but read my words. I was talking there about carrying a smart phone, which to my simple mind is different from carrying an explicit GPS.
Yes, I know that today they can be combined, and that to many people the two can blur together in the mind. Fair enough. And yes, I do know, in some considerable detail, how a GPS works.

In fact, I do own a rather old basic mobile phone. It is our ‘ring for road service when stuck’ device. The Australian outback is rather large and some roads are not much travelled. It usually travels in the car, but otherwise we don’t use it. Where we go walking there is usually no coverage anyhow: just too far away.

And ages ago I did buy a very basic GPS device: very basic. It tells me, when I turn it on, that it is now out of date, but it still gives coordinates. I bought it for a single purpose: resolving a geographical problem deep in the middle of Wollemi NP. After three many-day trips there exploring, trying to sort out the junction of some ridges, I resorted to overkill. (Thick scrub, no tracks.)

It turned out that the topo map for the area, which was created around/for WW II, was ‘not quite right’. I think the cartographers had been confused by the tree tops and the extreme topography: sandstone with a very flat plateau surface with deep cliff-lined gorges. The maps for the whole area are notorious for having many errors: extended 40 m high cliff lines are just not shown. It was, we suspect, beyond their imagination. And there are NO peaks or whatever to triangulate off; just thick obscuring forest. Great country in fact, but carry spare food.

Cheers

As usual our esteemed moderator is unable/unwilling to admit his utter and profound lack of understanding – in this instance: smartphone GPS apps.

But with this “moderator” it’s almost a predictable pattern.

Mr Moderator: It’s OK to not know everything about everything! If you got your head unstuck briefly from that deep, dark space and look around and read others’ posts, you might actually learn something.

No one here will think any less of you if you simply resist the urge to post an uninformed comical “opinion”.

“And there are NO peaks or whatever to triangulate off;”

same thing happens at night, during blizzards, heavy fog, heavy rain, etc- the reason that so many are glad to be carrying their gps (even in their phones)

Let’s recall the topic: Why it’s best not to rely on cellphone navigation when hiking.

so far all of the cellphone carriers have hedged: they don’t rely on their cellphone but carry back up.

for me the tiny screen on a phone is a deal breaker. And so are dead batteries. so is dropping your phone and breaking it. So yes, it’s a bad idea to rely on cellphone navigation when hiking.

For me, backpacking light is about simplification. What don’t I need to carry and still be comfortable and safe? I don’t need a phone; it’s relatively heavy and fiddly. I don’t need a smartphone in my life as a matter of fact and am happier without one. But that’s another topic.

No one here will think any less of you if you simply resist the urge to post an uninformed comical “opinion”.
Ah, but look how many other people have chipped into the discussion! Great involvement.

Cheers

In reference to helicopters, I do not think Outside article is factually correct because it appears to conflate the helicopter assisted rescue with the helicopter medical ambulance trip to the hospital. At least from what I heard in the SAR talk at Yosemite, Yosemite NP SAR has an agreement with local agencies (California CHP and US Navy) to extract climbers and bring them to the valley floor, all at taxpayer expense.

In Yosemite NP, if there is a need for helicopter evacuation to a hospital, a private helicopter aumbulance is called. And like any ambulance trip in the USA, that cost is on the victim and his/her medical insurance.

le provocatuer

Is that also called a troll?

@jscott
A good summary.

Cheers