Wednesday, April 09, 2008

GPS 101

When we went snow-shoeing two weeks ago at Lake Tahoe, we decided to climb up to the top of a ridge that overlooks the lake. Our friend loaned us a GPS unit, so we decided to take it with us. We wrote down our coordinates at the car so that we could find our way back. I read the coordinates to Ed and he put them in his pocket.

We hiked up the to the peak, taking a pretty direct route. One the way down we had to meander a lot more because it's hard to go down hill in showshoes (face-planting in snow still hurts).

Part way down, Ed asked "what units are the GPS coordinates in?"

I responded: "The normal units - latitude and longitude."

"But the numbers you read only have 2 decimals - that's only going to put us within 2 miles of the car."

"Oh. Well, there were more digits after the decimal, but I thought you would be annoyed at having to write them all down."

"You're right. I might have been annoyed."

2 comments:

D. said...

You went snowshoeing?! I'm jealous! I *totally* want to go snowshoeing. We have 6 months of winter here, and I still haven't done it. (I keep telling Susheem I want snowshoes for Christmas and he doesn't believe me!)

Did you buy or rent snowshoes? Tell me more!

Nikki said...

We rented snow shoes up at Lake Tahoe and went out for a couple of hours. It was really fun - all quiet and peaceful and pretty as we hiked up to a ridge with a view of the lake.

It was really easy to walk in the snow shoes on the way up. And then we started down...it's trickier than going up and I face planted once. But we got the hang of it.

Overall it was pretty awesome. It was definitely a big improvement over our last snow adventure when we hiked for 4 hours through the snow in our hiking boots trying to climb to the top of Mt. Timpanogos too late in the season. We didn't make it - it got too dangerous without equipment.

You should definitely try it - I think it only cost about $11 to rent the snowshoes. The hard thing is to figure out where to go where there won't be a lot of snowmobiles. We asked the guy at the rental place and he gave us good advice.