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Southwest Family Adventures

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Navigating

Navigation, and the fun technology to accomplish it, is a big hobby of mine. I love maps, and if you regularly use the words “waypoints, tracks, gpx, kml,” you’re speaking my language. Unfortunately, no single piece of software or hardware does everything that I need it to do, so I have evolved a system with different hardware and software components that I mix and match to best suit the situation. “Evolved” is an appropriate word: my system is continually evolving. I’m always on the lookout for new solutions that make navigating simpler or more efficient (I may be a dinosaur when it comes to some outdoor gear, but navigation technology is not one of them).

Over the past few decades I’ve been fortunate to have varied outdoor venues for employing, testing, and refining my system. This includes entering narrow passages in remote coral atolls in the South Pacific on our 40 ft. sailboat, finding fissures in the Utah desert for slot canyoneering, finding people while participating in Search and Rescue, and a ton of car-camping far off the beaten path. Different navigation tasks require slightly different approaches and tools. However, my base system has turned out to be general and widely applicable.

On this page I will discuss my current system, which is most specifically oriented towards navigating the woods and desert, both by car (usually to find the campsite), then by foot for the trail/off-trail adventure.

This is going to be involved enough to warrant an outline of the content:

Google Earth

Gaia GPS app for iOS

Garmin etrex 30x handheld GPS

We’re a homeschooling family in Los Alamos, New Mexico, hoping to give our boys a love for the great outdoors and provide them with skills they’ll enjoy for life. When it comes to camping, we are experts at getting off the beaten path, away from crowded campgrounds.  And adventuring to us can be as simple as checking out a local park or as ambitious as hiking a Colorado 14’er.

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Disclosure

Since we need gas to fuel our roadtrips, we are affiliates through Amazon.com and may earn from qualifying purchases made via our links. However, we will never recommend a product that we don’t use or are not excited about. Just like you, we aim to be resourceful, practical, and intentional with our purchases and will always give full disclosure of our relationship with any vendor, sponsor, or product.

Recent Posts

  • Fall camping, Cruces Basin way northern NM
  • Summit of Yale, Colorado 14er
  • Seriously challenging family yurt trip Feb 2024
  • Fall family camping in northern NM
  • Epic canyoneering trip (broken foot and helicopter rides)

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