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.)

I'M BACK IN THE HIMALAYAS—India this time. I click the GPS on at the first camp. Bar graphs instantly pop up, showing which satellites the GPS is locking onto. In 60 seconds I have my current coordinates—waypoint one. I mark my location on the map with an X. No bearings, no declination, no calculation, no triangulation. It's like using a calculator after you've been trained with a slide rule. Magic.

Soon enough, the handheld GPS will supplant the paper map, the compass, and the altimeter. The glory of getting lost will be lost forever.

The expedition gets off to a slow start. Each morning the GPS gives me a straight-line azimuth to the hypothetical campsite I plugged in at home, but it's meaningless. My mule skinner has his own idea of how far we will travel each day and will go no farther. When he gets to a campsite he likes, he simply yanks the slipknot on the pack horses and my gear tumbles to the ground. So in the evening I use the GPS to carefully plot the location and elevation of our actual campsite. It works like a charm. I always know where I am. Almost.

For three days we have to creep up a narrow, ticklish canyon. The trail is precarious, chopped out of an overhanging stone face above a thundering river. Always wet and slick and sloppy, the trail is just waiting to throw us off the cliff. Dubious rope bridges cross and recross the torrent. I want to mark the most hazardous places, but for the first time, the GPS fails me.

GPS receivers are line-of-sight devices. They have to be able to "see" the satellites. Their weak radio signals cannot pass through rock, metal, wood, flesh. Deep in the canyon I have such a thin slice of sky that the GPS can't lock onto the satellites. I must revert back to fundamental map-reading skills, sketching in a skull and crossbones in the most sinister places along the river.

Later in the expedition, after I've left the mule skinner and his ornery pack horses behind, I begin to pass through forests so dense, so thickly roofed with canopy, that the GPS is again rendered useless. My trusty old compass repeatedly saves the day.

With only a week remaining, I'm negotiating a delicate rimrock traverse when I accidentally knock my receiver off a ledge, and I'm reduced to navigating the old-fashioned way. I now feel naked without the GPS (and will buy a replacement for the lost unit as soon as I get home).

Eventually I arc back down onto the shadowy green floodplain of the Indian subcontinent. Malevolent bamboo forests once again. After a while I have to give up on even the inimitable map and compass. No matter what direction the compass points, or what the map shows, the foliage is so impenetrable I can't move ten feet off-trail. The footpath is all that matters.

On what turns out to be the last day of the journey, I get lost. I slump to the ground at the bewildering junction of three trails. It's crushingly hot and humid. My eyes are burning with sweat, my legs covered with scratches, bugs crawling all over me. I've been following paths that wiggle and dogleg for so long I feel as if I'm trapped in a maze. I don't know where I am and I don't care. I just want to get out. Too bad I have no idea which path leads me back to civilization.

I drink the last of my water and apathetically try to determine exactly how much I would pay for an ice-cold beer. I've got it down to somewhere between 50 bucks and a year's salary when a little girl appears.

Across her small forehead is a tumpline that cinches a large, conical basket of rice against her back. She is barefoot, her head lowered. When she sees me, she stops. I think she's going to run away, but she doesn't. I smile and go into a pantomime. I make the motions of eating and drinking. I make the sounds of cars and trucks. I throttle an invisible motorbike. I honk and toot and wave. Then I nod toward each of the three paths and raise my arms in the air.

She laughs and, with one lithe brown arm, points—the most ancient way of navigating known to humankind.

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