Pre-workshop Preparation
The Winter Route-finding Workshop provides experience in organizing winter tours on snowshoes, skis, or other means. Since tour groups often consist of people who are new to each other, the workshop aims to combine fun with safety through encouraging tour participants to know each other and participate in finding routes and making decisions.
Since most of the workshop is occupied by planning and tour leading, preparation for the workshop must include researching winter travel routes. It must also include learning or refreshing navigation techniques.
Resources for Navigation
Courses
Seattle Mountaineers Navigation Course
Seattle Mountaineers GPS Course
Books
Freedom of the Hills, Seattle Mountaineers, Mountaineers Books, chapters on navigation and wilderness travel
Wilderness Navigation, Bob Burns, Mountaineers Books
Wilderness GPS: A Step-by-Step Guide. Bob Burns. Mountaineers Books
GPS Made Easy: Using Global Positioning Systems in the Outdoors. Lawrence Letham. Mountaineers Books.
Winter Hiking and Camping: Managing Cold for Comfort & Safety. Michael Lanza. Mountaineers Books
Compasses
: A useful compass will have a resolution of 2 degrees and an adjustable declination feature. A very inexpensive Brunton TruArc 3 model ($13) has everything needed at a low price. Its' design avoids the bubbles that plague more expensive compasses. Also, it will work in both the northern and southern hemisphere of planet earth. There are many compass choices. Be sure to get one with adjustable declination and you will be pleased.
Maps: The Washington Department of Parks and Recreation web site has free maps for each of their snow parks. These have the advantage of including snowshoe trails. USGS (1:24000 scale maps, also free, are best for snowshoeing. Get them from store.usgs.gov. Custom maps for a tour can be built with computer software. Free software (BaseCamp) and free maps (GPSFiledepot.com) cover the world. Finally, guide books often contain sketches of tour routes.
Altimeter: Altimeters can be bought as single purpose units, or as part of another device such as a watch, a GPS, or a phone. They can cost as little as $60 or many times more.
GPS
A GPS supplements navigation by land features, maps and a compass. Locating its position on a map is the first of many possible uses for GPS technology. Other uses include recording the track of a tour for use in navigation during the tour and for sharing after the tour. For an encyclopedic GPS reference, go to http://www.gpsinformation.org/dale/wgarmin.htm.
The most important factor is in making good use of GPS technology is practice. This workshop can only be a first step. Using GPS on several tours is the only way to uncover the GPS methods that will work for you.
Until 2012, the Garmin company dominated the winter recreation market with its large selection of units. These featured reliable operation that included the display of topographic maps. The availability of free topographic maps covering the world was a decided plus. Garmin maps could zoom in and out to show fine detail or a broad overview. Garmins resisted moisture, were rugged, and could be operated by gloved fingers. They did all this with interchangeable and widely available AA batteries that lasted almost 40 hours. Undeterred by these advantages, those who had smartphones that were required by law to contain a GPS decided to use the GPS in the phone they already had. People who lacked phone and GPS were presented by manufacturers of phones with units that were waterproof, had long battery life, could obtain free maps, had a large touch screen, had cameras, could record sound, could playback music and movies, and more for less cost than Garmin was charging for
The Garmin company has made the most popular GPS units for snowshoeing. Their least expensive etrex models with mapping, the etrex 20 series, is a fine basic model. Now that smartphones with GPS are widely available, GPS apps for these phones have taken the place of dedicated GPSr (GPS receivers) for many outdoor enthusiasts. In an era when a smartphone like the waterproof and rugged Motorola G3 costs less than the cheapest Garmin GPSr, a dedicated GPS seems like a poor value.
Guide Books:Mountaineers Books: Snowshoe Routes SeriesSnowshoe Routes: Washington. Dan Nelson. 2015. New edition.100 Classic Backcountry Ski and Snowboard Routes in Washington. Rainer Burgdorfer. Mountaineers Books.Printing Maps
There are four ways to get printable maps.1. Web sites have printable maps. Sites like National Geographic and Trails.com are subscription services with map printing. Many snowshoe tracks start at Washington State Parks SnoParks. They have maps for their facilities. An example is http://www.parks.wa.gov/459/Blewett-I-90).
2. Make custom topographic maps with free Garmin BaseCamp software for PC and Mac. The popularity of Garmin GPS units stems from the availability of free maps that are easy to install on Garmin GPS units. Free topographic maps and trail maps for western states can be obtained from GPSfiledepot.com. Garmin-specific topographic maps that cover any part of the Earth can be obtained from this "tile" server http://garmin.openstreetmap.nl. The maps are "routable" in that they provide directions to destinations.
Free maps for Garmin's BaseCamp software, and also for Garmin GPS units, is available from the Web site http://www.gpsfiledepot.com/index.php. Many of the maps are furnished with installation capabilities for either, or both, PC and Mac computers. GPSFiledepot has tutorials for loading maps into BaseCamp and GPS units. While Garmin's BaseCamp software can display many useful maps, they can only be displayed as single maps. The Garmin GPS units can, however, display maps with transparent map overlays. For instance, topographic maps can have an overlay of hiking trails. Unfortunately, BaseCamp can only print out single maps where the topographic contours are on one map and trails on another.
With the Washington State topo loaded in BaseCamp, maps can be centered to display the area of any proposed tour. The maps can be marked up with waypoints that can be saved as a route. The route can be shared with other computers or phones. The route can be exported to Google Earth for viewing a photo realistic picture.
3. Free USGS maps from a Web map server are available here: http://www.mappingsupport.com/p/recreation/coordinates_utm_topo_map.html.. On this site, select t4 Topo High. From the menu, select UTM for an overlay of the UTM grid that is useful for snowshoe tours. For practice, select one of the SnoParks. Find it on mappingsupport.com, and print out a map that could cover a potential tour. Is the printed map sharp enough for you?
4. USGS maps can be downloaded from http://store.usgs.gov. These are PDF files of the large 1:24000 scale maps with full resolution. Printed at smaller scale ( to fit letter sized paper) they are less impressive. To get your USGS maps, go to http://store.usge.gov and Look for the Map Locator & Downloader badge. Click o Map Loader & Downloader.
On the Downloader page click both Mark Points and View Download Cart.
and
. You are not there, yet. Now click on the area of your interest on the main map locator map. An orange marker will appear. Click it and a selection of map options will pop up.
By the most recent map find and click on the download icon,
, to get your file.Open the file in Adobe Reader to see all the maps within it. Select the one you like and print it out. The bad news is that the USGS maps are designed to be printed on a very large sheet of paper. Printing them on letter size paper will make many details too small to easily see. The solution to this is to return to Garmin BaseCamp and print out a map you can see on letter sized paper.
Configuring declination on a compass
The compass must have adjustable declination. A inexpensive, and solid, compass is the Brunton Tru Arc 3 $13 at REI and other stores. To adjust it, grip between the face of the main dial and the back of the compass and turn the bezel. Notice that the hollow north arrow on the baseplate can be moved away from north. Adjust it to 16 degrees east of north. Other compasses use different methods. Most often, a small screwdriver on the compass lanyard fits a small slot underneath the main dial. Turn the screw to adjust declination. Other compasses advertise declination correction, but they have declination printed on the dial and totally lack an adjustment for declination. Avoid these.
Configuring GPSr (GPS receivers).
The GPS you want is a handheld, outdoor, color display, mappable unit with memory card capability. Models to consider are Garmin etrex 20s because they are the full-featured GPSr that are the lightest, ruggedest, most battery efficient, smallest, and cheapest units. Alternative units are larger, heavier, and more feature rich. Additional features include compasses, altimeters, and touch screens. All navigation capabilities are the identical. All now use both the American GPS and the Russian GLONASS satellite systems for enhanced reception in the woods, important in winter route finding in the Cascades.
The only controversial setup item is the choice for distance units between metric and imperial. Consider the convenience of metric. The maps you are likely to use are overprinted with a metric grid. Measuring distances in kilometers is easy on the newer maps. Knowing that snowshoers go at 3 km per hour and climb at 300 meters per hour is handy for estimating times and distances. Since a kilometer is about half a mile, switching between the two systems is easy. The last Mountaineer snowshoe tour I experienced had participants from other countries where the metric system is the rule. If the people you are touring with are using the metric system to their advantage, why not try it for yourself? Since the GPSr can save settings in profiles (on the main menu) you could have both metric and imperial profiles for different activities.
GPSr are handy in many sports. But travel is also an interesting use. I have used mine to tell taxis in Egypt where my hotel is. In japan, I knew which bus stop to take to get to a temple. In Cusco, i could find our way back to the hotel through a maze of streets. Free and paid maps are available to take you and your Garmin GPS (other brands are not as popular) anywhere.
Free maps are available on different Internet sites including www.gpsfiledepot.com. Files for every Garmin GPSr can be obtained from GPSfiledepot. The Washington State topographic map and summer trails overlay are posted on THIS PAGE.
POI, points of interest, files are also included for Washington State SnoParks and Washington summits exceeding 1000 meters in elevation. The SnoParks POIs are handy for finding automobile parking in the Cascades. The summits are useful not only for finding a summit, but for identifying summits on a tour.
A link to the setup procedure for the Garmin etrex 20 (and 20x and 30 and 30x) GPSr is THIS PAGE.
A link to the setup procedure for the Garmin 6xx (600 and other) GPSr is THIS PAGE.
Configuring Smartphone Apps
There are a multitude of GPS apps for smartphones. The two most popular GPS apps for snowshoeing seem to be MotionXGPS $6 for iPhone and GaiaGPS for iPhone and Android $20. The big problem with phones is short battery life while using their GPS in the cold. Changeable batteries are rare in phones. Stuffing a battery extender into a waterproof case will be difficult to impossible. ZipLoc bags are flimsy. Cases and battery extenders are also rare commodities. If you want to chance breaking your expensive phone, you could try the bag method. But you are not likely to get more than three hours of use on a charge. That is too short for recording the track of any tour but a very short one. The big plus of the phone you already have is cheap GPS apps and a big screen. Do these appeal enough to risk carrying the phone in a bag?
That said, a link to the setup procedure for MotionXGPS is THIS PAGE.
By completing as much of this homework as you can before the workshop, you will make the workshop more productive. Of course, this homework will produce questions about maps, GPSr, phone apps and more. The workshop will be a place for hands on help in answering questions and learning more.