Quote:
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?

Absolutely why not. In fact, the GPS can provide a level of feedback, of detailed confirmation, that you'd never be able to get without it. Your posts here indicate (in my humble opinion, anyway) that you're on the right track. The trick is in being able to connect your real world observations with "map information." And when I say map information, I'm including GPS data, whether in the form of lat/long, waypoints, or programmed basemap.

There's no real shortcut to learning to do what you're learning to do, which is compare the information in your maps (in whatever form) to the things you see and are trying to walk upon.

It all gets rather philosophical and complex, I know. But the "training" you described about comparing your topo to what you're seeing in front of you is the right way to go.