[Philmont]: GPS info

I attempted to post this as a reply to the earlier post, but it kept getting kicked back. So here goes as a new post.

Pete,

Last year I took my Garmin 3+ and had a blast with it. I actually was
amazed at the amount of Philmont information in the "Roads and Recreation"
CD that Garmin makes. My version is 3-4 years old and it does not have all
the camps, but it has some. Perhaps the most important thing is that it has
many of the streams and mountain peaks if you use the highest level of
detail.

National Geographic/Topo came out with a Topo mapping region for New Mexico.
Topo is a good program for planning and setting waypoints in advance and
uploading into your GPS. I did not buy the New Mexico version because they
could not convince me that there was any real detail of the Philmont area.

I don't know about the e-Trex, but I was able to leave my unit on all day
while hiking and end up with a "bread crumb" trail of our days trek. It was
great to compare to our "plan". The other thing I discovered too late is
that the "bread crumb" feature had a memory limit and was only able to save
about 3 days worth of hiking. There was a feature to save it and start
fresh which takes less memory.At night I would input the crews plan for the
next day and manually input waypoints. I would have put a lot in, in
advance, but our trek was "fire modified" so we had no idea before we went.

There are many lists of coordinates floating around. Most are stored on
Sheldon's website which I am sure someone will provide the address. This is
a great resource. I have some I think I can provide, but they are only
helpful if you go where we went. What may surprise you the most is that the
maps are not that accurate. Do not expect to key in a trail intersection or
camp off of the maps and have it be right on. It is close, but we had some
that were 1/8 to 1/4 of a mile off.

What is real fun it to have it on while heading to base camp down from the
Tooth of Time. When you are done, compare your actual route to the map. If
you get to come into camp from the Tooth, you will hear lots of stories
about that hike in the coming months.

Alan Hamm
Bethesda, MD

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Received on Wed Mar 12 16:54:45 2003