Forgive me for responding to multiple posts all in one go here, but Gershon said in another post:


I was in that very same sort of country in September and don't recall having a problem getting a fix when I wanted one. It seems to me that terrain that's dramatic enough to prevent a person from getting a location for some period of time (while walking along) is likely to be so dramatic as to be pretty clear to figure out on the map, along the line of the "staying found" discussion. Certainly there will be exceptions, but still.

Phat talked about running low on battery power. I think this might be in part a matter of process. I personally keep the GPS turned off except for the infrequent cases when I need or at least want a fix. In some of those cases I'll keep it on for a while to increase confidence, but in general for me it's just a matter of finding (or verifying) where I am on the topo map, and then the GPS gets turned off again. So not a ton of power drain.

I'd also point out that a spare pair of AA lithium batteries is pretty darned light, and I could often buy these in trail towns along the way. In five months of using the GPS most days, I never ran out of battery power, and I used the GPS overall a whole lot more than I have on any other backpacking trips.

Carrying a protractor: in the Army they issued a little plastic sort of protractor, and this was handy in plotting coordinates with more reliable accuracy, but with a modern GPS that displays position on a topo map on screen, I wouldn't find it worth fiddling with.