Sewed my own hiking gaiters

I made my own Dirty Girl gaiters.

I searched around town and the only place that sells spandex fabric is this place called Art from Scrap. Art from Scrap gets a lot of industrial waste and sells it to people who want to make art out of it. There are a lot of medical things, shavings from skateboard wheels, broken surfboards, leftover scraps and molds from the Teva factory and lots of other odds and ends. They had only about 5 scraps of spandex so I bought the best one and made these gaiters.

I used my Dirty Girl gaiters as a pattern. I do not have an overlock sewing machine, so I sewed with a zig-zag stitch to preserve the stretchiness. It worked! I think they came out pretty well, although not as professional as Dirty Girls. She doesn't have to worry about me encroaching on her turf, that's for sure! They're wild enough to look like real Dirty girls, however.

I hope to test them out this weekend.

I have not posted many pictures to this blog because I used up all my free space on Picassa. I still have a Flickr account, but it's also free so whenever I upload pictures I am not allowed to organize them into new sets. So they get lost eventually. I figure I could use Flickr for my blog because I don't really care if the pictures are organized for the blog.

More on navigating

A nice man on the PCT list described how the PCT is so easy to walk that you lose your place on the map. You can walk for tens or hundreds of miles without having to ever look at a map. His term for it is you "become situationally disconnected" from your progress on the map.

That's the best description of the experience I had trying to use maps on the PCT. I started to feel like maybe I didn't have any idea how to use maps anymore. I almost never had to look at the maps. So when I did, they were nearly useless because I had no idea where to begin looking for my location. I just couldn't figure the maps out. Even in the snowy Sierras when we had been using maps I felt like a map dunce.

As we neared Sonora Pass, my friends and I had been using a really nice Green Trail Map to find our way. It was very helpful as we traveled on top of snow. Soon we descended out of the snow into more forested realms. We followed the nice wide trail for a long time and did not look at the green trail map again.

The following morning, I set off ahead of everyone. I climbed into snow again and eventually I could not find my way. There was a post with directions but it was pointing the way I had just come and calling that North. My maps were useless because I had the little guide book maps. I never could figure those out. They are all out of order in the book and too small to be of much use. The description didn't help much because it mentioned a dirt road and I could see one but no way in hell was I going to risk my life trying to hike on it when it was covered in vertical snowfields.

All I knew was where North was and that there was an east-west road coming up. So over I go cross country down a large canyon. Eventually I find a trail. Eventually a lake. Faint foot prints. Then people. I knew by the time I saw the lake that I'd gone the wrong way but I figured out what lake it was by the shape so knew where I was. I found my way to the east-west road and back to my friends.

As an aside, at one point we were unsure of the direction, we were in deep forest and off trail due to looking for safe stream crossings and at that time, it was the guide book description that saved our butts. We found a dismantled bridge mentioned in the guide book described as one we would cross and from there deduced the way to where the bridge had been prior to its dismantling and found the trail again.

I believe it's good to have a lot of tools in your box. And when you are stupid, like perhaps I am, or when they fail to help you, then a great tool to have is to just not panic and use some horse sense. You are not guaranteed to die or be rescued just because you aren't following a path.

A GPS is superior in some ways to a compass

A GPS is superior in many ways to a compass. It is very hard to locate yourself with accuracy on a map on a clear day let alone under conditions where you cannot see or identify the surrounding peaks. I have triangulated myself using a geologist compass and protractors and even with perfect conditions it was still hard to place myself on a map. With a GPS I would be able to place myself perfectly even if there was fog or trees to block my view.

On the PCT I didn't have or know how to use a GPS and most of the time I never bothered with my compass. Instead I relied on my watch. After a few weeks I knew what my average pace was. With the data book and guide book and my watch, I could pass a point of interest, check the time, check for the distance to the next point of interest in the book and then calculate the time it would take to get there. At the appointed time, I could look around me for the point of interest. I could be within 5 minutes accuracy on a regular basis this way. I came to rely upon this means of navigation almost entirely.

By looking around, I mean really looking. I met a many people who missed things because they didn't look. I would find sticks that perhaps had once been aligned as arrows but now were scattered, very faint tracks in the dirt, signs facing the wrong way on trees that had fallen over, rocks that appeared out of place to me. With my watch, I'd know it was time to start looking and I'd look very carefully.

I am reminded of the book Clan of the Cave Bear. It's fiction, but I always remember how in this book when the people needed a map, it would not be a diagram of a bird's eye view of the land but of the points of interest you'd see as you went along. I read the book a long time ago and thought if this really was how things had been done at any time in our human history, it certainly makes a lot of sense to me because it is how I make sense of my landscape on a daily basis all the time. I am also reminded of the trees they have found throughout the eastern US that had once been purposefully bent so that they would form a directional pointer to the way to go to get somewhere.

Navigating by such ground-level means has been with us a long time. They are good skills to have and seem to be dying as much as compass-reading due to our overly distracted, non-introspective, non-observant culture.