Plan a fun and safe hiking trip with a little help from this REI infographic. The illustrated map gives you a bird’s-eye view of the United States’ 11 National Scenic Trails which measure more than 18,753 miles combined. You’ll also find tips on what to bring with you hiking, as well as trail trivia.
Item of interest: Only 3 of the 11 NSTs (Appalachian, Potomac Heritage and Natchez Trace) are considered one of the 397 official “units” of the National Park Service. Why? Because the NPS was directly involved with land-acquisition efforts for those 3 trails.
Infographic courtesy REI. Check out REI’s wide selection of hiking gear!
No Food. No Map. No Cell Phone. No Problem.
Imagine you found yourself alone in the desert, miles from anywhere, with no food, water, shelter or cell phone reception. Could you save your own life? Most likely, the answer is no. Left to our own devices and without supplies, the majority of us lack the necessary skills to survive. Fortunately, it’s never too late to learn.
Outdoor guide publisher Waterford Press introduces the Pathfinder Outdoor Survival Guides™, designed to help you take control in a dangerous environment by teaching you how to use the resources available — whatever they may be. The Pathfinder method, honed over 20 years of hands-on experience by master woodsman and survivalist Dave Canterbury, is presented in a pocket-sized, 10-guide series from Waterford Press.
Disclosure: Waterford Press contacted me recently to try their Pathfinder Outdoor Survival Guides at no cost to me. They told me to let them know if this was something I might be interested in covering, and that they would provide sample review copies.
Like the Pathfinder School System on which they are based, these guides follow the wisdom of the ancient Native American scouts, or “pathfinders”. Charged with the task of locating the perfect spot to sustain their nomadic tribes, the pathfinders learned to recognize resources that would afford food, shelter, water, medicines and protection. Today, the Pathfinder Outdoor Survival Guides equip 21st century explorers with the skillset they need to be their own pathfinders.
“Whether you’re a hunter, a recreational hiker or even a civilian living in a city, everyone should know how to survive a dangerous situation,” says Canterbury. “That’s why we developed the Pathfinder guides, with all the information you need to make it out alive and kicking.”
Lightweight, waterproof, and virtually indestructible, the Pathfinder guides are an essential part of every pack. With Pathfinder Outdoor Survival Guides™ in your pocket, no matter where you are, you’ve got the answer.
Waterford Press’ Pathfinder Outdoor Survival Guides retail for $6.95 and are available for purchase at 800-434-2555, at book and outdoor retailers around the country, or at select online retailers (see below).
About the Pathfinder Outdoor Survival Guide Series:
After using several of their guides in the training program at his Pathfinder School, Dave approached the innovative publishing firm, Waterford Press, about creating guides for survival basics – navigation, fire starting, trapping, and primitive weapons construction – fields he knows well. The collaboration resulted in a 10-guide survival series that captures both the essence and the wisdom of his practical experience and teachings.
Pathfinder Outdoor Survival Guides™ titles:
Building a Survival Kit
Signaling for Rescue
Improvised Trapping
Shelter, Fire, Water
Basic Tracking
Improvised Hunting Weapons
Basic and Primitive Navigation
Wilderness First Aid
Edible Plants of the Eastern Woodlands
Medicinal Plants of the Eastern Woodlands
I was less interested in the guides related to hunting and fishing because I never stray far enough away from civilization on my day hikes to find myself in total survival mode. However, I was enticed by the navigation guide, the signaling guide, the wilderness first aid guide and the shelter and survival kit guides.
The guides themselves are well made, laminated and waterproof so they can withstand a dunk in the creek or an unexpected downpour on the trail. The equivalent in size of two 8.5×11″ sheets of paper folded in brochure format, the guides are printed front and back with black text on white background for ease of reading. They are full-color brochures with plenty of graphics for demonstration purposes. The text is a bit small. At nearly 60 years of age, I had to put on my reading glasses to see the print comfortably.
The information imparted is basic in nature. The space on each brochure isn’t sufficient to go into great detail, but I think the content is spot on. For example, the brochure about fire describes 10 different methods for getting a fire started. The same brochure also describes half a dozen different means of creating a temporary shelter from common supplies you may have with you in your pack, or makeshift materials you can find in any forest.
I suppose the ultimate question is, would I carry these brochures with me when I hike? They are lightweight, only about 3 ounces each. However, were you to carry more than five with you at the same time, you’re looking at more than a pound of weight added to your pack. Perhaps just one or two that are related to the terrain and conditions you will be exploring would be a helpful assist in an emergency, particularly to a novice. Education is a critical part of safety. Ideally, we would study and learn all the information contained in the brochures before leaving home, and recall it if necessary. You just don’t know though, how your mind would react when in shock.
Making foldable, laminated waterproof printed material is expensive, but when you consider the typical 36″ x 26″ laminated waterproof topographic map goes for $10-12, $6.95 for each of these brochures seems a bit pricey to me. Otherwise, with the holiday season fast approaching, these Pathfinder Outdoor Survival Guides would make great stocking stuffers for your favorite beginning outdoors lover.
Disclosure: Waterford Press contacted me recently to try their Pathfinder Outdoor Survival Guides at no cost to me. They told me to let them know if this was something I might be interested in covering, and that they would provide sample review copies.
I don’t hike alone often, but when I do, I prefer Dos Equis. No wait, that’s not right. Let’s try again. I don’t hike alone often, but when I do, I always make someone aware of where I will be and when I expect to return. As I have become more and more experienced at hiking, and pursue adventures that take me farther and deeper into the wild places, my family and friends want to know that I have returned from my trip safely.
Surely by now most of you reading this are well aware of Aron Ralston’s story Between a Rock and a Hard Place that was brought to national attention by the highly acclaimed film 127 Hours. While Aron’s adventure makes for an exciting tale, it would be perfectly fine with me to avoid wilderness incidences that require search and rescue. I espouse the philosophy: no pain, no pain. My brother and I have experimented with various satellite and cell phone monitoring and notification devices over the years. Some are kludgy. Some are completely worthless if your battery dies or you have no cell signal. Some succeed in half measures. The technology is improving however.
Disclosure: Cayo-Tech Communication Ltd. contacted me recently to try their free personal safety smartphone app, Guard My Angel. They asked only for my feedback.
On June 20, 2012 the Cayo-Tech marketing team emailed the following:
Hi Jeff, I enjoyed your blog and I wanted to reach out to you regarding our app which is increasingly being used by hikers. Guard My Angel is a free mobile app that alerts one’s designated contacts in case of emergency. It helps hikers feel safer and be safer by making asking for help just a click away. As a hiking blogger, we would greatly appreciate your feedback on the app.
At that time, in June, they only had an Android version of Guard My Angel, so I suggested they contact me again when their iPhone app was available. That time is now. On August 5, 2012 Cayo-Tech notified me that Guard my Angel is now iPhone ready. So I put it through its paces.
First, a little about Guard My Angel. From their website:
Guard My Angel is a geo-location personal safety application that helps you feel safer and be safer everywhere you go. Guard My Angel watches over you without compromising your privacy and automatically detects emergency situations. In times of need it alerts your pre-selected contacts with the information they need to provide assistance.
Before heading out, you set a timer for approximately how long the activity should take, and when you’re done you simply indicate that you are OK. If you don’t, or if you pressed the SOS button, or if we detect accident forces, your pre-selected contact(s) will immediately receive notification with a link to a Google map that tracks the phone to the last traceable location.
Here is a short introduction video that gives you an idea of some of the uses for Guard My Angel:
Despite the somewhat cheesy name, Guard My Angel works as advertised and is quite useful for my purposes. It downloaded from the Apple Store and installed just fine on my iPhone 4, always a good first sign. The user interface is easy to understand and simple to use.
When you launch the app it will ask you to turn on location tracking. If you have a problem with that, then Guard My Angel will still work, just not to its full extent. Turning on the tracking enables the application to notify your contacts of your most recent location in an emergency. It sure beats guessing.
Once you’ve launched it on your phone, the first step is to go to the Settings function and setup your contact lists. There are options for SMS messaging, email, or a Facebook wall. You can setup contacts in one, or all three of the notification methods. I chose to do testing with SMS messaging and email. Pressing the edit button beside each will open a dialog that enables you to add contact phone numbers and email addresses to the lists. With the free version of Guard My Angel, you are limited to one distinct contact in each list. That is perfectly fine for me. You can earn an upgrade to three contacts in each list by using the app for 3000 minutes.
That’s really all there is to the setup. No heavy lifting or technological miracles, just a smooth and easy inclusion of the people in your life who will need to know you are in a dire circumstance.
So now you’re ready to go for a hike. To use Guard My Angel you simply activate the tracking on the Home function. There is a slider that allows you to set a time that ranges from 15 minutes to 6 hours. Once you have the estimated duration of your activity dialed in, just press the Watch over me! button. It’s that simple. The Guard My Angel icon will begin an animation, the timer will begin decrementing, and you can put your smartphone away.
It should be mentioned that the application can only track your location if there is a cell signal. That makes sense, right? I mean the phone has to connect with the Guard My Angel server in order to record your most recent coordinates. So, you may ask, what happens if I’m way, way out in some totally wild place that never will have a signal? How do I even get the thing started?
If you think that may be an issue, simply add some extra minutes or hours to the timer and enable it when you are still near civilization. That way when you turn on the timer, it can connect to the Guard My Angel server and begin the monitoring. Even if you lose your phone, or the battery dies, or you break it in a fall, the Guard My Angel server will continue the countdown and can still notify your contacts. They won’t have your exact location, but they will still receive a map with the location where you started the monitoring. Hopefully you already told then where you would be anyway.
Having said that, it’s a worst case scenario. As long as you are hiking within an area that gets even an irregular cell signal, your smartphone can still communicate your location coordinates to the Guard My Angel server periodically.
The application seems to have minimal impact on battery life while in operation. I tested it for several hours and found the battery usage to be hardly noticeable. I usually run GPS map drawing software on my iPhone when I’m hiking and that app uses considerably more battery power than does Guard My Angel.
So you’re out hiking, right, and you have your Guard My Angel running, and you’re really enjoying the scenery… and WHAM! You get hit in the head by a tree limb. Or you fall in a hole and break your ankle. Or you get just a little too close to the edge of that waterfall. Oops! What now?
That’s where the SOS button on Guard My Angel comes in handy. It’s like a panic button. Just press SOS and it immediately sends out a distress notification to your designated contacts. If it’s an SMS message to their phone, or an email to their computer, it includes a link to a Google map with the time the smartphone was in the specified location, the battery level of the device, and the accuracy of the location that was received from the phone. Obviously, that’s really handy when they notify search and rescue. Although I didn’t test it, presumably the same occurs with the Facebook wall posting method.
In my testing, the location info was accurate to about 50 feet. That’s close enough, as they say, for government work.
Now suppose that tree limb knocked you out, or the waterfall got your phone all wet so you can’t push the SOS button. Well, the timer is still running at the Guard My Angel server. Unless you push the I’m OK! button before the timer reaches zero, your contacts will still be notified that you have not completed your hike in the estimated time frame.
At the end of the day, if everything is fine, you had a great hike and took lots of beautiful pictures of the amazing scenery, simply press that I’m OK! button and the timer stops and resets. All is well. The server now knows it no longer needs to track this particular trip. No notifications to contacts is required, and you can tell them through regular channels just what they missed.
What if you forget all about it, and the timer expires anyway because you’re a Meanderthal like me? Well, there’s a handy reminder. The application sounds an audible alarm and vibrates your phone five minutes before the timer is due to expire. Just push I’m OK!
I’m sure you have some concerns, like privacy for example. What do they do with all that tracking information on their servers? They clear trip information periodically for trips that took place more than 24 hours ago, and they provide access to this information only when they send the notifications to your pre-defined contacts. Whatever your questions, they have it covered in the Help section of their website.
In conclusion, I now have a new tool on my hiking safety belt. Some people don’t like the idea of technology out in the wilderness. They say it detracts from the essence, from the commune with nature. Believe me, I still carry a map and a compass. Where safety is concerned, they are still at the top of the essentials list. But as more and more functionality becomes available in smartphones, I’m finding a number of the new innovative apps like Guard My Angel, to be technological solutions to long-standing problems. If you have your smartphone with you anyway, why not add another layer of protection with Guard My Angel.
Disclosure: Cayo-Tech Communication Ltd. contacted me recently to try their free personal safety smartphone app, Guard My Angel. This product review is my response to their request for feedback.
I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. My regular hiking companions have designated me the lead hiker, so I suppose that makes me the slowest Meanderthal. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site. 
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