RECALCULATING!
Even if Death Valley managers now are adding heat danger warnings to dozens of new wayside exhibits...
I never use GPS. Give me a map any day.
I had a GPS once that kept telling me to go into downtown Oakland. No Way Jose.
GPS is amazing little device, but I’ve seen it give bad directions twice already.... 99 percent good, yes. 100 percent, no way.
always have a map if you’re going into unfamiliar territory!
Charlie..call home..its a rental vehicle..Move back to your parent cellar...Your services are not needed..but thanks for your participation in the experiment.....You check is in the mail.......
In the early 1990s when GPS first became available to the public... we bought a handheld unit for our airplane. It had a rudimentary moving map that even showed special use airspace. It was revolutionary for flying. The GPS system was shut down twice while we were flying. I guess that would be almost unheard of these days.
I never flew the plane using the GPS without having a sectional opened up on my knee pad that I followed along with and continued to make notes while we were flying and also tuned in VORs on our NAVCOM radios. I still never rely completely on GPS while flying.
Why are any of these people there in the first place? I call this my biggest TV inspired fear: dying in the desert. But I guess I’m right to be afraid, it seems to happen quite regularly.
Once, we drove to Monument Valley in Utah from Chinle in Arizona using our GPS. Leaving Monument Valley for the trip back our GPS directed us to go in the opposite direction than we came. It then sent us down a narrow road along the edge of a butte, and then into the desert along a dirt road. We followed the GPS as it directed us onto one dirt road after another each less traveled and well marked than the one before. Soon, we were literally in the middle of nowhere, with nothing in sight, no mark of human habitation seen within the last hour. Finally even the last trace of a road vanished, and we were left in the desert, surrounded by powdery sand of uncertain depth, although the GPS told us were on a numbered state highway and beckoned us on further into the nothingness. Had anything happened, had the car been stuck in the sand, or anything, we would have died. Very gently, I inched the car around to go back the other way, and it was hours before we arrived back in Monument Valley. Suddenly the GPS unit flipped its directions around and sent us back to Chinle the way we had come in the first place.
What is Alicia and her six year old doing alone in Death Valley in August?
RECALCULATING!
I think that, other than travel in desert and other wildernesses, GPS units are very useful. They are not infallible, but neither are maps. I like Garmin stand-alone units. Many people find the units pre-installed in cars much harder to use. I wonder which Ms Sanchez, one of the victims in the article, was using.
Drinking urine will kill a kid in no time. Maybe avoid wandering into a desert?
Thomas Guide provides.
That being a choice, you're practically completely to blame if you die under these circumstances. Not that it's wise in the first place to drive into Death Valley with no knowledge of the area thinking just GPS is a perfect brain.
Joshua Tree is beautiful. Death Valley is trouble for anyone who fails to read a guide book before going there.
My parents’ 2013 Hyundai has a GPS that is useful for local cities alone. It is useless to get help going from Los Angeles to San Francisco. But once in SF and needing to find a local address, the Hyundai GPS does ok.
While iPhone Siri is accurate, I prefer to use AAA maps.
There was a case in the news a few years ago in which a couple was following a popular map application and became stranded in the snow on a road normally closed for winter. The husband died of hypothermia.
Living at the rural edge of civilization I always throw a flat of water bottles in my vehicle any time there is even a remote chance of being stranded. This costs $5.00 and can save your life. Plus, the water is still good if you don’t drink it on that trip.
Last summer there was an active forest fire and I went to visit a friend 10 miles away. My passenger was baffled when I put the water in the vehicle, but when I said there is a chance we might get stranded for a while by the fire, and I can go a lot longer without food than water, she sort of understood.
I did not bother to explain that the roll of paper towels is a great substitute for TP in an emergency.
One of the favorite arguments in favor of autonomous “self-driving” cars is that they rely on GPS for their navigation.