azcanyon - I think I understand your post. Your post indicated that a gps could not tell me the distance to a distant peak, whether known or not. I should have been more detailed in my original post - I want to be able to know line of sight distance, not walking distance. I have been doing exactly that in trying to train my eyes and mind to learn distances. As a matter of fact I was on a ridge trail three weeks ago and came to a beautiful vista. I oriented my map with compass and, having hiked for a long time in the area, identified a distant peak. While the gps was locating sat's, I measured out the utm coords. When gps was ready to navigate I entered the utm coords that I had come up with for Big Fodderstack and then hit 'goto'. The gps told me that I was looking at a peak that was 3 point 2 something miles away. I studied this view for a while - commiting to memory as much detail as possible. Of course it would have been just as easy to do this without the gps and just measure to scale. But why not?