The Hiking Companion by Michael W. Robbins

Author:Michael W. Robbins
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Storey Publishing, LLC
Published: 2014-09-19T19:49:38+00:00

Maps

A good, detailed map is the best navigational tool for hiking, and most topographic maps deliver a wealth of information. But maps can be wrong. One caution with the government-issue maps, especially those of the big national forests, is that in some instances the serious, on-the-ground survey work was completed decades ago and was followed by only aerial surveys to pick up the major “cultural” changes like the building of an Interstate highway or the creation of a new open-pit mine. But otherwise, nothing on the map — and that includes decades-old designations of trails — gets checked on the ground or changed on the paper. I learned this the hard way.

Hiking alone in New Mexico’s Black Range west of Truth or Consequences and south of the eerie Plains of San Agustin (the site of the railroad-mounted Very Large Array of radiotelescopes), I got lost several times in the space of several days of hiking. Lost in these circumstances, I came to realize, is a relative term. It wasn’t that in the popular parlance “I had no idea where I was.” (I did once get lost so thoroughly in Mexico City that I truly had no idea where I was, except that I was in Mexico City.) I knew, as I hiked along in the open ponderosa pine forest, on a carpet of reddish brown duff, that I was in New Mexico, that I was in the Black Range, that I was in the Gila National Forest, that I was probably about 7,000 feet above sea level, and that I was somewhere west of Winston and Chloride (practically ghost towns then) but had not yet crossed Route 59. At least I didn’t think I remembered ­crossing a paved road . . . I knew I was moving north, more or less (I had a compass to tell me so), and that I was near the top of a meandering broad ridge that was heavily forested and not all that well defined. So I figured from my map that I was more or less walking along the Continental Divide (it’s a clear dotted line on most maps, but invisible on the ground).

But as I hiked and looked vainly for clearer signs that I was on a trail, for a blaze on a tree or some other indicator that someone had purposefully walked this way before, I did not know precisely where I was. My best guess was that I was somewhere in a square about ten miles to a side. More specifically than that, I couldn’t say.

I was not alarmed. It was a pleasant day with no sign that the weather would turn ugly, and I was not in a hurry to be at a specific spot at a specific hour. I was sort of lost, but I thought, “So what?” It did occur to me that not being more precise about my location than “an area of 100 square miles” would sound thoroughly and alarmingly lost to most people. To someone in familiar urban surroundings, say back east in New York, it would sound nearly hopeless.

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