I Know Where I'm Going (Cont.)

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Outside Magazine September 2002

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The Hard Way
I Know Where I'm Going (Cont.)

ONE YEAR LATER I RISE early, stirred by dreams of navigation. On the staircase a cool foredawn gloaming falls through the window. I step inside my office, close the door, and unfurl the maps.

Great journeys always begin with a map—some kind of drawing or diagram that communicates the relationship between here and there and what lies in between. Marks with a stick in red sand or clay, reed-pen sketches on papyrus, satellite images: It's all the same. A map is the promise of discovery, a geography of odysseys to come.

The maps surrounding me, enlarged color photocopies of 1:200,000 Russian topographic maps, are better than the ones I used on the previous trip. I can't read the Cyrillic type, but it doesn't matter. What matters is that the contour interval is a much more reasonable 264 feet. One inch equals 3.3 miles.

I've already perused them, but, just as you reread a favorite poem in order to grasp more layers of meaning, I retrace the contour lines, those thin veins of brown ink that connect points of equal elevation.

The contour line is the hallmark of a topographic map. Atlases place countries in their proper locations upon continents; country maps place cities and highways, rivers and mountain ranges in their proper places within a national border. Thematic maps offer graphic representations of everything from military expenditures and food production to financial wealth and biodiversity. Loads of info, but it's all two-dimensional, flat as a pool table.

Topo maps, even more than relief maps, are 3-D software, resplendent with precise mathematical depth. The more tightly the contour lines squeeze together, the steeper the slope; the more space between contours, the more level the terrain.

As I interpret the contours, geography blooms in my mind. I follow draws, circumnavigate summits, cross passes. I descry knife-edge arêtes with insurmountable aiguilles, potentially climbable couloirs, hanging glaciers, lateral moraines, gaping bergschrunds, inescapable cirques.

I pencil in a traverse through the mountains, identify likely stream crossings, cul-de-sacs, saddles. Using previous Himalayan journeys as a gauge, I estimate daily travel distances and mark potential campsites. It's all perilous conjecture, at once marvelously exact and abstract.

Now for the GPS. Using a sleek Garmin eTrex Vista (only five ounces, this beaut has a built-in altimeter and electronic compass), I punch the map coordinates of each theoretical campsite into the receiver—"waypoints," in GPS-speak—and give them names. Glacier Camp, Cirque Camp, Valley of the Nymphs Camp—all of it stored in the receiver's memory.

If I were planning a trip in the United States, I could simply download USGS topos directly onto my GPS. Still, a miniature LCD screen is no match for the soon-to-be-antiquarian paper map. Until portable-display technology catches up with the virtues of paper and ink, no navigator worth his worn boots wants to travel without a map.

Waypoints entered, I set aside the GPS and stare at the maps. I see avalanche paths, ledges, ice faces, summits. This is the genesis of adventure.

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