Mule Riding with a GPS

by Ival Mc Dermott, Freehold, New Jersey

I have been riding with a GPS for about three years now and it has really changed the way I ride!  Some of my friends use the most sophisticated and complex GPSs with ease.  Others have told me they took the durn thing back to Walmart after one try! I am more with this second group!  The purpose of this article is to tell what a GPS is and how you can use it for trail riding.    I’ll also tell about the easiest to use GPS I have found.

What is a GPS?

A GPS is a small hand-held battery operated gizmo, which can tell you exactly where you are on planet earth!!  It is actually a receiver for a network of satellites up in the sky, maintained by the U.S. Government.  These satellites and receivers make up a Global Positioning System (GPS) that enables a person using the hand-held receiver to mark a starting point, then ride out any distance, and still know exactly where they are with respect to getting back home. The GPS can also tell you how far and how fast you have gone, and lots of other useful information.  It can get a “fix” on your position as long as you are moving and it can “see” three satellites in the sky. 

The minute I heard that such a thing existed I ran out and bought one, as my favorite thing to do with my mule Ginger is to go out alone exploring. Ginger is good, but I want to be able to get back home without having to rely completely on her to be a GPM!

There are many kinds of GPS’s, some simple, some very complex with features galore!  The simplest and in many ways the best I have found for mule riding is the Garmin Etrex.

What can a GPS do?

The basic things GPS can do are:

• mark “home” and have a way to point you back to it.
• work in the woods, canyons, snow storms, and the middle of nowhere.
• store information so that it does not die at critical moments because the batteries run out.
• mark “way points” (landmarks along the trail) and make a “breadcrumb trail” (track) which you can see on its screen as you ride along. 
• save this track and let you bring it up and use it as a map to ride the same trail another day.
• plot out a route between different places and guide you in riding that route.
• keep track of your mileage, speed, riding time, and even the time of sunset in your area.
• accept a map from an outside source (like your computer) and show it on screen (so you know if there is a big lake between you and the way point you are aiming for).
• hook up to a computer and let you print a map of your trail

 

The Garmin Etrex

The Garmin Etrex is one of the simplest GPSs around. It can be bought everywhere and comes in several models.  In this article I am discussing the yellow one, the basic and least expensive one (about $120).  It is small and light and designed to be used one-handed.  Since a GPS registers only when you are moving, that makes it ideal for riding, especially on a rambunctious mule! You can buy a fitted cloth case for it, which protects the screen from scratches and can be tied securely into a horn bag to keep it handy. Its buttons are on the sides and rubber covered, so they don’t get pushed by accident when you are moving out, and you can push them without untying it from the saddlebag.   Ergonomically, it is perfect for mule-back. It uses two AA batteries and gets about 20 hours on them, which is enough time in the saddle at one stretch for almost anybody. And if you have to change batteries it remembers your information even if you turn it off. (click on photo to enlarge)

It is also simple to operate, even for the electronically-challenged.  It has only 4 buttons: on/off, page, enter and up/down.  The page button goes from screen to screen (different screens are called “pages”). The enter button lets you tell the GPS to do an action, like mark a way point or start a “go to”, and the up/down button zooms you in or out on the breadcrumb trail map.  In less than one hour with the booklet that comes with the Etrex you will know how to use it to mark a place and show you how to return to it, and a lot more.

The pages you usually use will be the menu page, map page and the pointer page. 
The menu page directs you to the other pages and gets you into the waypoint pages so you can mark your waypoints easily.  
The map page shows the breadcrumb trail (track) you are making as you go along, and also the waypoints nearby so you can get the lay of the land.
The pointer page shows a compass ring that tells what direction you are going: north, south, east or west. 
To set the GPS to navigate (lead you to a waypoint), you tell it to “go to” that waypoint.  The pointer page shows the name of the waypoint you are heading for and has an arrow in the compass ring.  When that arrow is pointing straight up, you are heading directly toward that waypoint. If it is pointing to the right, you should turn right to head the correct way, etc.  A nice feature is that on the pointer page the Etrex will also show you your mileage for the ride, as well as your speed and the distance back to home or to any other way point you enter.  One thing to remember is that you have to clear the trip odometer and speedometer before you start a ride unless you want a running total.

On a recent day I used the Etrex to retrace a wilderness ride I had done earlier with a guide.  I had saved the track log (breadcrumb trail) from the first ride, and I brought it back up on the screen and used it as a map, using the trackback feature. The screen showed the bearing line (direction to go) and also the course line (breadcrumb trail I was making as I rode). The pointer page also showed the arrow pointing me along the trail, but the map was easier to use at the turns, as the GPS only registers every several seconds and the arrow pointer is most accurate on the straightaway.  On that ride, even in deep pine woods, the Etrex was able to get and keep a satellite fix; although I did have to let it power up in a clear open area when I turned it on.  I also used a waypoint I had entered from a car ride in the area and rode to it through the woods; the arrow pointer showed me the way. You could also enter a route in advance using several waypoints, and the GPS would give you a straight line map and set up arrow pointers between the waypoints so you could ride it. 

There are drawbacks to the Etrex, as compared to more complicated multi-featured units. The biggest one is that it has no basemap, a preloaded map of streets and roads to use to orient yourself. With the base model Etrex you just get a blank screen with your track being recorded on it. Another GPS I used gave complete information on every super highway in the USA, right down to which one had Starbuck’s coffee at their rest stop.  This information was of little use on muleback, so I have been happy to trade that feature for the Etrex’s ease of operation. Another problem with the Etrex (and other GPSs) is that it can “lose” you when it does not have a clear view of the sky.  On a recent dogwalk in heavy snow, a few small segments of my track did not record, even though there were no leaves on the trees.  Perhaps we were moving too slowly or the snow was interfering. When the Etrex cannot get a fix on you, at least you know it, as it shows a blinking  ? on the screen. The problem was nowhere near bad enough to get me lost, as the Etrex got a fix on me quickly when I got into open areas, and it always showed the map of my track.  The biggest inconvenience was that it did not record mileage for the short segments it missed. One other problem is that, although the book says you can download map software from your computer to the Etrex, it does not tell you how to do it.  I will have to by a fancier model (the Etrex Venture or Legend models have more features) or wait for my smarter friends to show me how to add software or print maps of my travels.  The last drawback I noted was the annoyingly cute cartoon man who appears on the screen in some functions; it would have been much better to have a mule rider silhouette or at least a pair of ears pointing the way.

All in all I recommend the Etrex as a good basic GPS for anyone. Hopefully my friends or other readers who use more sophisticated GPSs will write articles in the future detailing how to use them to do much more than this article covers. Meanwhile, if you have not tried riding with a GPS, try it! You have nothing to lose but getting lost!

If anyone wants to talk about using a GPS for mule riding, email me at horsedds@aol.com

Follow Up Question:

Let's assume you are lost, how does it tell you to get back home? Does it say so many feet and then turn right/left etc? - Like the directions on mapquest maps?

Answer:

A GPS can tell you how to get home in at least two ways. First, it draws a line on its screen as you go - called the Breadcrumb Trail or course line.  So, if you are really lost enough to want to retrace your steps (I hate doing that so I would have to be really lost) you can just turn around and as you ride, watch the line being drawn on the screen. If it diverges from the line you drew on your way out, you have gone off course.  You can also set it to something called 'Track Back' which will do basically the same thing, except it will alert you, even with a beep, if you go off course.

The other way it can get you back home is  - if you marked the place you started (which is always a good idea!!) by setting it to "go to" that place (called a waypoint), the GPS will then show an arrow, the direction of which will change as you change directions. When the arrow points straight up, like 12 o'clock, you are heading directly toward the waypoint (home).  When the arrow is pointing right, it means turn toward the right to go home.  In other words, try to go so that the arrow is pointing up and you are heading home.

In both of these ways, the GPS shows you how far it is to where you started. If you are in track back, it shows how far it is to go back by that exact route.  If you are in 'go to' it just shows the distance as the crow flies. IMc

Illustration taken from Garmin etrex website