A heavily repaired trail junction sign and cairn in the foreground on a rocky alpine meadow with a stand of firs in the near distances. Mt. Adams on the horizon, its peak cloaked in haze and clouds

Topos, GPS, wayfinding, ignorance and serendipity

Published 2024-07-26

We were hours out of town when I realized we hadn’t packed a compass. First time in my life going into the backcountry without one. We didn’t need it (AllTrails, natch) but I really miss navigating with topos. I love GPS but miss being 100% disconnected.

I miss being ignorant. I miss knowing at best imprecisely exactly where I am. I miss tree blazes, trail signs, and cairns. I miss making guesses, asking around, backtracking, being flexible.

I miss the ritual of visiting the ranger station to procure topos and backcountry permits and local knowledge. I don’t even know where the ranger stations are located in my favorite spots now. (Do ranger stations still exist as physical locations?)

We have traded understanding for precision. With a topo and a compass I could get a sense of the shape of a landscape, even if I seldom knew exactly where I was, unless we were at a stream crossing or something. I could draw a mental picture from the contour lines, and then superimpose that picture over what I saw with my eyes. Now the phone tells me to the meter how far I am from the trail, but even with lots of pinching-and-zooming I can’t quite resolve that mental picture any more.

When I ask the GPS “where am I?” it tells me “46.49863° N, 121.46408° W”; but the answer I need to know is “Snowgrass flats, on a broad ridge between the Goat Creek and Cispus River drainages.”

I hate knowing exactly how far we have to walk, and especially hate my kids constantly asking for that number (“how far is it now?”). There is a lot of mental freedom in the honest answer “we are one footstep closer than we were before.”

Most of all: I miss serendipity. I miss that in order to do a thing like camping you first had to show up … and then hope there were spots available. Mmmaybe you could call the ranger station (long distance! expensive!) and mmmmaybe someone would answer and mmmmmmaybe they would “reserve a spot” for you or something, but in general: FIRST YOU HAD TO SHOW UP.

There is still serendipity in (most) backcountry camping, but like other forms of travel these days the Internet has sucked all spontaneity out of it. If you don’t claim your spot on Recreation.gov in January, you won’t have a campsite in July, full stop. Gone are the days where “planning” a road trip meant asking for a week off work and buying a tank of gas.

Panorama of a high alpine valley with a young person in the foreground, looking into the camera, wearing a STREET ROOTS cap. We are just at the boundary where a layer of marine clouds are rolling into the valley, experienced here as a heavy fog to one side and clear sunlight on the other

Cispus Pass, with a marine layer rolling in from the west

A group of backpackers climbing a narrow path up an alpine ridge toward a cluster of mountains dotted with patches of snow

Ascending Goat Ridge

View from the top of a barren alpine pass looking down a u-shaped glacial valley toward forested mountains. On the right/west, a thick fog of marine clouds rolls over the ridge from the neighboring valley

Cispus Pass descending into a foggy marine layer

Low-perspective view of a small stream running through wildflowers on an alpine meadow, with shafts of near-sunset light falling over a forested mountain landscape in the distance

Wildflowers and a snowmelt stream on Snowgrass Flat

Alpine landscape taken from a hillside in shadow. A stand of tall firs in silhouettte frames the distant view of forested valleys with a retreating layer of low marine clouds under a crisp blue sky. Mt. Adams, snow-clad, glowers on the horizon

Mt. Adams from the Goat Rocks Wilderness