On Tue, Aug 20, 2019 at 7:42 AM Andy Townsend <ajt1...@gmail.com> wrote: > Where Garmin on-device routing is really useful is for when you need to get > to somewhere but don't have an on-screen route to follow - for example if the > weather's turned and you need to abort a previously planned route and get > another route to your destination from where you currently are. It's also > useful where there are natural obstacles like rivers, where the distance on > foot may be significantly more than the as-the-crow-flies distance.
Thanks for that insight! Without it, I was having trouble figuring out why you'd ever use on-device routing for a hike. Hiking is so seldom about finding the easiest path from A to B! And I should have thought of that, because one thing on my 'bucket list' that may well remain unfulfilled is the ambition to climb Mount Washington in New Hampshire, and descend on the side where my car is parked. The routing I'd want in a lot of cases would be 'shortest time to get into tree cover' or 'shortest time to get to a paved road.' (For 'time', if I'm doing an estimate for a group, I use "2 miles (3.2 km) per hour, add 40 minutes for every thousand feet (300 m) of elevation change - up or down. Maybe fiddle the number if there are fords, rock scrambles, or other known slowdowns." Sorry for working in Freedom Units - it's what's printed on the maps around here.) My personal use of GPS when hiking tends to be to pull it out every half-hour or so as a cross-check on navigation. A little more often, perhaps, if I know that I've departed a trail and I'm trying to choose a heading back to it. I tend to favour hiking on trails where you *will* lose the trail from time to time, or rather abandon it, because of a rock slide, a microburst, or a flood. The last is particularly common, because our good friend Castor canadensis has a way of modifying the landscape faster than the trail builders can respond, partly because he never troubles to get planning permission or write an environmental impact statement. Moreover, once you are more than a few km from the nearest highway, all trails get pretty approximate. I have the impression that trails in your part of the world are a lot better defined and maintained. -- 73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
