Getting Lost With a GPS Unit

[+Headhardhat]

I am about to do a filming for an upcoming GeoSnippits video. It will spotlight the topic of electric breadcrumbs or the tracback functions on several different GPS units.

 

My question is this. Say you mark where your car is on the GPS and did not turn on tracking. What real life examples are there to show that you still can get "lost" even though you have it marked. Is it possible? If so why?

 

Would appreciate any and all suggestions. I have been asked by several viewers for this particular subject and of course I would like the feedback by our fellow geocachers.

 

Thanks as always and if you do not want your name mentioned please specify in the post.

 

-HHH

[+Cache O'Plenty]

First thought here is that "tracking" is how to get back to the car - the route. The "mark" is where it is located. So, you really aren't lost, it just may take a longer time to find the correct route!

[+kayak-cowboy]

Sure it is possible to get lost even with your car being "marked" on the GPSr. A scenario that I see is going into the woods and losing GPS reception. Another scenario is not having extra batteries with you and your GPS goes dead.

[+Cache O'Plenty]

Sure it is possible to get lost even with your car being "marked" on the GPSr. A scenario that I see is going into the woods and losing GPS reception. Another scenario is not having extra batteries with you and your GPS goes dead.

No reception and no batteries = no GPS at all!

Edited July 7, 2009 by Cache O'Plenty

[+briansnat]

Not trusting your GPS. I learned to trust my GPS over my sense a long time ago.

[+Casting Crowns]

I did something stupid.....out in VERY thick woods with undergrowth during a rain storm. We found the cache and I would erase each one from my geep so that I wouldn't go back to a recently found cache. Big mistake. I didn't mark the trail before I went into the woods and we were literally lost for about 30 minutes. We just had to walk towards the next cache and hope we crossed another trail. We did find a trail but I was totally embarrassed and the cacher hasn't gone out with me since.

[+Steve&GeoCarolyn]

We were lost for about 5 hours despite having the parking lot marked on the GPS. It was supposed to be an under 2 hour hike but ended up lasting 6. We didn't know how the tracking function worked on the GPS at that point. We learned a lot of valuable lessons that day, of which the most important was to take plenty of water.

 

It really doesn't matter where the GPS points if the direct route is through an impassable swamp (without much better gear) and nearly impassable cliffs elsewhere. It is also unhelpful if the GPS is going crazy because of heavy vegetation. The important thing is to be able to find the trail. In this case, if there was a trail we never found it. We followed a deer trail for a while, but it petered out.

 

Here are the logs from that day. (It's really one long story told in three separate logs):

 

Mirror, Mirror

 

The Saga of the Frozen Dozen

 

Wild Turkey

 

Carolyn

Edited July 7, 2009 by Steve&GeoCarolyn

[+wimseyguy]

A few years back someone posted a story in here about getting lost in a swamp. When they called 911 to get picked up via coordinates instead of an address it caused substantial confusion at the other end of the line. It took a few hours, but they were finally rescued.

 

They don't play in here much anymore, so I don't know if you'll get any first hand info.

[+Pat in Louisiana]

We were not actually lost, we just couldn’t figure out if the spot where we crossed the creek was up stream or down stream. We were trying to track a deer the neighbor wounded and we knew we had crossed the river about an hour ago so we figured once we got back to the river if we walk either way for half an hour and didn’t recognize the crossing we were going the wrong way. Fortunately we chose wisely.

[knowschad]

NOT saying that it couldn't happen to me, but I've been out in "the woods" as far back as I can remember... long before GPS's were invented. Never really learned to use a compass (but I should have!) either, but I've never been seriously lost. A bit turned around a few times, requiring a little more walking to get back to the car, but that's it.

 

Of course, you are looking for stories of those that did, and not those that didn't, so I guess I'm off topic.

[+paleolith]

I've only used my GPSr to "get back" a very few times. In all cases I was off trail and the vegetation was thick enough that it was hard to see more than a couple of feet ahead. I was more worried about finding a light spot to minimize bushwhacking, in cases where ten feet one way or the other made a difference in that respect.

 

Waypointing the parking seems mostly pointless if I know the trails, and mostly pointless if I do ... not saying it would be useful (I have found myself walking the wrong direction on a trail, or wondering which trail to take at an unmarked junction), but knowing the trails (at least having a map) and knowing how to read a topo map (and having one) have generally been far more important to me.

 

Edward

[robertlipe]

OK. I'll fess up my story in the opposite of the woods.

 

I parked my car in the dark in NYC with intentions of walking to three nearby caches. I confidently placed a waypoint on my car as I hopped out as I'd done literally thousands of times before, took cursory note of my surroundings ("tall, ugly building near a slum and the intersection of busy roads") and marched on to the three caches. After loging the last, I went to navigate back to the car and followed the arrow. Didn't look familar. Didn't see my car. Had it been towed?

 

I'll spare you my several hours of walking and wandering trying to recreate my initial location from the broken track log while not "contaminating" it further, but in the end, I realized that my stupid Garmin didn't *really* have a lock when I pressed "mark".

 

I have probably 60+ GPSes and I'll venture more experience with them than most people. At the time I did this, I probably only had 40 or so, so I guess I was a noob...

 

Still, I broke pretty much every navigation rule and paid the price of bleeding feet.

[+Pendragon Crew]

There was an alligator in the way and I had to find a new route. Need I say more?

[+bittsen]

I could see how one would be in a mountainous terrian and think the path down a hill towards their car was the correct route but not know of the waterfall or large stream in their way if they take the more direct seeming route. Perhaps a canyon wall could get in the way also.

Not knowing what is ahead is what gets so many people in trouble every year. The advent of terrain mapping (topo maps) has helped a great deal but are still not guaranteed to get you where you need to be.

 

There is a movement to get trail maps added at gpsfiledepot where people map their trail hikes and add them to a database (or something along those lines)

I have downloaded the NWtrails but can tell it is far from complete. I wonder why the forest service has not allowed their maps to be added to a download. They could even spend a few bucks to create a database of trails. It could save countless hours of searching if they make it harder to get lost.

[+Chewy_06]

ive got a slightly off-topic story to add...

 

years ago, while volunteering in marine SAR (which i still do, i just havent had a repeat of this - thank goodness!), we got tasked in our 5.9m rigid hull inflatable to a marine emergency in winter that was well far out of our normal operational area on a dark, wet, stormy and lumpy night. Three senior coxswains and one junior one all on the boat (bad news - too many leaders & zero followers), we beat ourselves silly for two hours to get to the search area. Now, to put this into perspective, two hours effective endurance for a crew on this type of boat in fair conditions for SAR duty is about right. In the conditions we were in, we were exhausted, our protective suits were soaked, we were *really* cold & worse yet, that old RHI we used to have was already at it's maximum range & we'd rapidly depleted our fuel getting to that point.

 

We still had the good sense to get a replacement crew going & setup a rendezvous at a fuel dock that was supposed to be nearby. Of couse having never been there before, not being familiar with what turned out to be a complicated area to navigate, hammering ourselves silly in 8 foot seas and 40 knot winds with every *stinking* wave coming over the bow landing directly on our faces (to find out how enjoyable that experience is for yourself, the next time you're a passenger in a car being driven on the highway in a rainstorm, roll down the window and stick your face out), worrying about being light on gas and not having done a lick of actual searching nevermind rescuing things were slipping badly.

 

That's when IT happened. The direction we'd been going in, all of a sudden didnt make sense to us. So, we stopped, examined our then-state-of-the-art Furuno GPS chartplotter, our radar image, we even tried comparig it with our paper chart like all good mariners, unfortunately it got soaked and disintegrated in a shower of wind whipped salt water. The most senior coxswain made reference to not being sure where we really were & that we couldnt afford to be wrong, or we'd need rescuing ourselves. The second most senior coxswain determined that we were, in fact, "lost". And, he picked up the mic for the VHF radio.... and proceeded to tell the coast radio station that we were in fact lost.

 

Then he gave the exact lat and lon of precisely where we were lost at.

 

We did find our way in out of the weather and into the dock, the releif crew was there for us. I shivered for a whole day afterwards. The good news is that it's made a great training story for me for the last ~15 years to help illustrate the sharp decline in performance of an exhausted crew.

[+Lothar69]

A few years back someone posted a story in here about getting lost in a swamp. When they called 911 to get picked up via coordinates instead of an address it caused substantial confusion at the other end of the line. It took a few hours, but they were finally rescued.

 

They don't play in here much anymore, so I don't know if you'll get any first hand info.

 

I remember this story. Classic! Nothing like calling 911 and saying "I'm lost but I can tell you exactly where I am!"

[+StarBrand]

Happened to me just a few weeks ago. The cache was on top of a large wooded hill. After I found the cache I haeded back to the car but got to a point where there were 2 deep gullies both going in the same general direction - I knew I came up one of them. Off I went and put the GPS in my pocket. About 10 minutes later I realized that I had turned and nothing was looking familar. Sure enough, I pulled out the GPS and headed back to the top where I took the other one to get right back to the Jeep. Silly mistake - should have kept watching the GPS or looked closer at the tracklog.

[photomankc]

I have never had a true, 'My god, I'm completely lost' moment but there was a time when the battery life on my GPS was not so good nor were the maps (streets only) and all I had was marked intervals 1 mile appart on the trail. Coming in it looked pretty straight forward so I was not too concerned. Then on the way back the trail kept forking off with pseudo-trails and ATV tracks and game trails that for some reason were 10 times more confusing in this direction. The trail was one that liked to swing back and forth through saddles and so it was not always apparent which was the correct direction. This is in deep Missouri forest and in every direction there is.... just trees. Everything looks the same in every direction mostly with no major landforms that can be seen from a distance. No real terrain features to use with a paper map.

 

That was a long hike out with the extra bushwhacking and dead-ends but since I had a reasonable depiction of the trail and a bearing to the previous checkpoint I could at least swing the correct direction to intersect the trail again rather than always have to backtrack. In that day I would mark the checkpoints on the paper topo as well. Now I use the tracklog on new trail always. It's a very simple matter to follow it back out and even if the GPS goes down I have a good idea from memory of what the terrain features I passed were on the map.

 

I never have been real good with map-n-compass in the thick forest. No features to see and no way to sight very far. I can muddle along in a pinch but if you got me miles out into the bush and with no clear trail or idea where I was it could get ugly fast I'll bet.

Edited July 14, 2009 by photomankc

[+jadefalcon]

I've marked spots on my GPSr and forgot to hit 'save'. Make sure you hit 'save' when making a new waypoint

[+Wooden Cyclist]

I met a local cacher at the final stage of a multi in a nature preserve. We introduced ourselves and traded stories for awhile. The I asked " which way is the parking lot?". He looked at my GPSr then looked at me with a sly grin. I walked away laughing at myself.