Crouched over an open map, Lauren Atkinson lines up the red string attached to her clear plastic compass along the printed red line that corresponds to the trail she’s on. She measures the length of the string between the marked trailhead and the stream on the map—the same one gurgling beside her. Pinching the bit of red fiber between her fingers, she estimates how far we’ve traveled by comparing it to the map’s mileage scale bar.

Meanwhile, Tim Bray has just left another breadcrumb. He’s dropping them every 10 feet. Actually, his global positioning system (GPS) device is doing it for him. The digital breadcrumbs create a log of where he’s been, so if he gets lost, he can turn around and follow them back to his starting point.

Tim, a former adventure programs manager for AMC, doesn’t have to worry about that yet, because we are only a quarter-mile from the trailhead for The Nature Conservancy’s Green Hills Preserve, in North Conway, N.H. Our destination—1,739-foot Peaked Mountain—is less than 2 miles away.

He and Lauren, who is AMC’s group outreach coordinator and Leave No Trace master educator for the Backcountry Campsite Program, have joined me at the preserve for a navigation showdown. Through a series of three challenges, I will pit Lauren, and her compass and topographical map, against Tim, and his base model Garmin GPS unit, topo map, and compass (for backup). Allowing Tim to use a paper map gives him an advantage over GPS users who rely on the maps on their GPS devices alone, but AMC recommends this method because GPS devices can fail and because some paper maps are more up-to-date than built-in or downloaded topo maps. Adding the compass, another recommended safety measure, also gives him a competitive edge.

Such advantages are allowed since this “showdown” is more like a friendly experiment. Although we are timing each event, the goal isn’t to crown a winning contestant or technology. Instead, we aim to demonstrate how GPS and map and compass work, and the benefits and limitations inherent in each.

The Challenges

Challenge #1: Where Are We?
One mile up the trail, we stop at a sapling, and I ask Tim and Lauren to determine where they are on the map. The trail, which has become steep, cuts through a forest of hemlock and northern hardwood species. On one side, a stream flows at the bottom of a steep embankment. Looking back down the trail, nearby peaks are just visible through the foliage. Tim goes first.

GPS: “Every time—I look at my map first and look at what we know we’ve been doing, knowing that we turned right at that intersection and knowing that we’re close to the river mapped on it,” Tim explains, as he alternates between reading the map and studying his surroundings. “It looks like we turned left just before the river ends or comes out in a spring. Looking at my GPS, I know that the distance traveled from that last [intersection] is 0.23 miles and it’s a 0.6-mile leg, so we’re somewhere up on the third contour line is my guess.”

It takes Tim just over a minute to make this determination. It helps that he is using a map from the most recent AMC White Mountain Guide (28th edition), which has mileages printed alongside each segment of trail between trail junctions. That’s how he knows the slice of trail we are on is 0.6 mile. He would have also had that information had he preprogrammed his route into his GPS prior to the hike, but he’s working from scratch.

Tim further confirms our location by taking a waypoint. His GPS unit reads a latitude of 44.02487 degrees north and a longitude of 71.05821 degrees west. Tim matches those coordinates to the coordinates labeled in degrees and minutes running around the map border. They intersect on the contour line designating 1,000 feet, which crosses the trail at about where we are standing. Only four minutes have passed since he began the challenge.

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