If you could Google (which, of course
you can, but likely have no inclination to do so) GPS on my blog, you
would quickly become acquainted with my views
on GPS usage. I won't reiterate my position here (well, maybe I will
briefly), except to say that a GPS is far less necessary in the
outdoors than you believe it to be. If you know how to read a map,
read terrain, use handrails, checkstops, backstops and a compass, 98%
of the time travel through the outdoors is easy without a GPS
regardless of prevailing conditions.
I staunchly believe that if you learned
to recreate outdoors using a GPS you have never learnt properly how
to navigate, and, unless you put the GPS down, you never will. I
also believe that over-reliance on technology is making us stupid.
The difficulty lies in proving these things, which, are much like
proving the existence of a superior being (and I mean some kind of
god, not a dog. Dogs, as anyone who has owned one knows, are superior beings whose existence is not in doubt.) It's really impossible, at least in a practical sense to prove these
things, although lots of studies have actually shown that people who
rely on GPS's have poor spatial and navigational sense. GPS
aficionados, however, will always argue that these studies (primarily
done in urban environments) don't apply to them.
High in the Kokanee Range using a map to identify local peaks
On the type of bulletin boards that
seem to attract the less experienced, people argue endlessly and
passionately about GPS units, almost always dividing into two very
unequal camps. The people who learnt to navigate without GPS
technology (who are almost universally older) and the people who have
never learnt to navigate at all but believe, by dint of having a GPS
grafted to their hand, that they can navigate. You don't have to be
young to be in the latter camp, you just have to be “young” in
your outdoor career. Amazingly, some people have even done “studies”
comparing GPS accuracy to Smartphone GPS accuracy as if this is some kind of metric that is actually meaningful.
Perhaps if you are planning to launch an unmanned drone attack on an
unsuspecting camper in the next valley north (or south) this might
have some utility, but, if you are within 30 metres of accuracy in
the outdoors and you can't work out what to do, you have bigger
problems than the precision of your Smartphone GPS.
Of course, the problem with all this is
that the Dunning Kruger
effect prohibits the people who can't navigate without their GPS from recognizing their own incompetence. They are, in effect, locked in
an endless treadmill much like the carbohydrate addicted mice who,
even when released into the outdoors didn't run away from a sugary
food source to freedom.
Using a GPS allows these folks to point
quite accurately at a map (usually on their device of choice) and
make confident assertions about their location (unless these folks
are also certifiably moronic they will always be right), and (if
they have loaded someone else's route into their GPS before leaving
home, which they have invariably done) how far they have left to
travel to reach their destination. This confidence impresses not
only their gullible, but equally inept traveling partners but
reinforces their own belief in their ability. Much like the monkeys
of Borneo
who prefer to hang on to the banana and be captured rather losing the
banana and running free, the GPS addicts can never know the freedom
of traveling new routes until they open their hand and let go of the
GPS.
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