Weather
Pressure Trends and the Walker's Altimeter
A barometric altimeter is also a small weather station. A short guide to reading it that way.
Tag
navigation
Weather
Fog Navigation in the Smokies: A Year of Observations
Twelve months of fog reports from one ridge, and what they suggest about reading the cloud you are inside.
Maps & Routes
What GPX Files Leave Out
The GPX file format has, in twenty years, become the universal currency of digital route sharing. It also flattens the experience of a route into a thin sequence of points that omits most of what a good route description would carry.
Maps & Routes
The Ridge as a Handrail
Among navigation techniques taught at British outdoor centres, the ridgeline handrail is one of the simplest and the most consistently misunderstood. Used well, it removes most of the decisions that get walkers lost.
Trails
A New Ridgeline Route in the Cairngorms
A small mountaineering club proposes a thirty-one-kilometre traverse across the Cairngorm plateau. Two members walk it in late April to see what it asks.
Skills
Navigating Fog by Sound
On the Rhinogydd in May, Astrid Pereira lost the path between two cairns and found her way back to the col by the noise of a single stream a quarter mile below.