Mt Whitney Zone Forums General Discussion Death By GPS.

I had to do a bit of dead reckoning once. My partner and I proudly stood on the summit of Mt. Williamson at 4:30 PM, exactly 15 years ago today. It began to snow as we started down. We had no GPS, no compass (or at least we never used it), no moon, and minimal starlight making it through the clouds. We did have headlamps, but we didn't use them much, since they keep your eyes from fully adjusting to the dark. By 8:00 PM, it had snowed 6" and it had been dark for hours. We had been "feeling" out way towards Anvil Camp with the headlamps off for the last 20 minutes. I thought we were close to camp and turned on my headlamp. Camp was thirty feet away.