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Thread: LF hikers, do you remove plastic tree ribbons?

  1. #71
    Alan Klein's Avatar
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    Re: LF hikers, do you remove plastic tree ribbons?

    Quote Originally Posted by Drew Wiley View Post
    Cellphone maps are abbreviated and don't show anywhere near the detail necessary to safely avoid serious topographic obstacles. They're also battery dependent. As far as roads go, phone maps contain many errors, and don't give current road condition information. Numerous times people have opted for some phone navigation shortcut in the mountains or desert where they ran into a dead end or ran out of gas, or died stranded in a blizzard, because the alleged road being traced had fallen out of maintained usage a couple decades before; or they even got caught behind a gate locked for winter after they already entered. There is simply no substitute for inquiring locally before heading down side roads. Horror stories like that happen every year in the West, sometimes multiple times the same season.
    Some hand-held GPS's as the Garmin I linked to earlier have 24K topo maps loaded which are very helpful. Another way to handle it that I used to do, is use a computerized 24K program where you can mark your waypoints on the computer. Then, before your leave, you download the map with the waypoints into your GPS and have all the waypoints available to navigate your way. I would also printout the map on NatGeo paper which is waterproof and tearproof as backup and take a Suunto compass along as backup. https://www.amazon.com/iGage-Weather...3243448&sr=8-5
    https://www.suunto.com/en-us/Product...M-3-G-Compass/

    The other nice thing about the gps, is when you get home you can download you bread crumb track to your computer and see your hike overlaid on a satellite image or topo map of your choice. It would give distance travelled and rise and fall elevations. Nice way to keep a record of your hike. Of course you can mark waypoints in the gps on the hike as you take pictures so you also have a record of where all your photos were taken as well.

  2. #72
    Land-Scapegrace Heroique's Avatar
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    Re: LF hikers, do you remove plastic tree ribbons?

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    Just to add one more growing fashion – tree-side reflectors, screwed or tacked directly into the tree.

    Anyone else started seeing these?

    With all the plastic finding its way into the woods, those hated cairns and rock piles are starting to look good.

    And one has to wonder, how did all those 19th-Century mountain men, and earlier Native Americans, ever find their way around?

  3. #73
    Drew Wiley
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    Re: LF hikers, do you remove plastic tree ribbons?

    I've been up many a remote high altitude pass wearing vibram soled boots and toting an ice axe, when I've stumbled onto obsidian flakes or actual atlatl point, so predictably in fact, that I knew exactly where to look - someone long ago found a convenient spot out of the wind to resharpen or reattach a point, while surveying bighorn sheep in some meadow far below. Some of these early hunters no doubt navigated over vast glaciers now long gone, whereas historic tribes stuck more to canyon routes over passes, just like modern backpackers and horsemen do. But they all got around, and knew where the necessary little caves and rockshelters were. That's exactly how we country kids did it too, yet with many a close call or cold night. There's nothing worse for a good night's sleep than suddenly discovering the cave you picked out on the side of the cliff was imminently due for an annual freetail bat migration right into it.

    When I was 12, I made acquaintance with an elderly Indian who had grown up aboriginal, and actually shot at railroad workers laying narrow gage lines into the backcountry. The Indians in that area were never either pacified or eradicated like further north in the gold country, but slowly assimilated into ranching and logging jobs, or through intermarriage. This individual recounted stories of his own youth, and crossing Paiute Pass barefoot, with just a rabbit skin blanket for warmth, along with a trade party obtaining obsidian from the east side of the range. Some of those passes, including that one, are rough enough with modern boots; doing it barefoot before formal trails existed would have been another category of travel entirely. But they routinely did it for millennia.

  4. #74

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    Re: LF hikers, do you remove plastic tree ribbons?

    Quote Originally Posted by Heroique View Post
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    And one has to wonder, how did all those 19th-Century mountain men, and earlier Native Americans, ever find their way around?
    They did roughly the same things, they just didn't have plastic

    Cairns, cloth, broken branches, memorizing landmarks, etc. Not so much different, just biodegradable.

    Doremus

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