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The Digital Distance Hike - Part 1 Communicating from the Trail

Ron 'Fallingwater' Moak

Many of us find our daily lives so inundated with people trying to reach us via emails, cell phones and pagers, that we run screaming to the mountains in search of that elusive state of solitude. Yet, increasingly more of us are dragging that bubble of civilization along with us as we venture into the wilds. With the increasing proliferation of satellite-enabled devices, it may not be too long before there's no where left on earth to which to escape.

The issue of technology usage on trail has reached a fevered pitch on crowed trails like the Appalachian Trail where there is a contingency of hikers who look down on technology-enabled hikers much the same way as civilized folk looked upon lepers a century ago. For them, use of any technology in the backcountry is a major breach of an unwritten "Hikers Code of Ethics".

For the rest of us who are not so fervent in our feeling about technology, we must walk a fine line between the world of the wild we're drawn to and the world of civilization that we can never let go. There has been and always will be a certain amount of tension between those of us who wish to escape and our friends and loved ones at home who want to make sure we're safe.

Back in the late 1970's my father-in-law was so concerned about me dragging his daughter into the wilds of Maine that he insisted that I carry a CB radio in case of emergency. There were many discussions before I was able to persuade him that CB's would be totally ineffective deep in the Maine wilderness. Eventually he relented, though I know he was quite concerned until we were safely back in the mountains of Virginia.

By the time I was getting ready to hike the Pacific Crest Trail last summer, the range of options for keeping in touch was overwhelming. There are PDA's (Personal Digital Assistants), cell phones, two-way pagers, satellite phones (which at $10 per minute were definitely out), mobile computers (ie. more backbreaking pounds to carry) and email devices.

Taking a hint from some of the previous season's thru-hikers, I settled on the Sharp TM-20 PocketMail device. With a list price at about $120 and even cheaper on eBay or through some of the discount houses, it certainly was in my price range. Of equal importance to this light-weight hiker was weight. Last thing I needed was to spend months meticulously shedding ounces only to waste it on some heavy device. At eight ounces, with two AA batteries, it came to about the same weight as the paper notebook I was planning on carrying and it is a lot more useful. Now I could write my journals at night as I hiked, emailing them when ever I got to town. When they arrived in my wife's in-box at least they would be legible, even if she had to spend time spell checking and proofing them. Otherwise, she would have been forced to re-key my somewhat illegible handwriting.

The built in address book feature allowed me to store all those names and addresses of people I planned to call occasionally from the trail, that is if I ever found some time. It did come in handy for collecting all those thru-hiker names. Instead of trying to write them down and misspelling half of them, I'd simply hand over the PocketMail and ask them to enter their particulars.

There are a number of locations along the PCT that have Internet access with more coming online each year. Regrettably, they are hard to schedule your hike around. If you're lucky enough to get to a library while it's open, frequently you'll need to wait quite awhile while its few terminals are being used by other hikers or town's folk.

A built in modem, allows the PocketMail to communicate on virtually any pay phone, though there were times when we'd need to try two or three phones to get one that would send our message through. Since we weren't bound by the laws of common decency that say it's not nice to wake up mom and dad or the spouse at 5 in the morning to ask for more money in our next mail drop, we could dash off that last e-mail and post it before leaving town.

By the time I'd hiked several hundred miles up the trail, half of the people in the groups we were hiking with had acquired the devices. They were especially useful for my foreign hiking friends that had the added burden of overseas long distance rates mixed with the wide time zone differential.

So if you need to take a bit of technology into the backcountry to help you keep in touch, you may want to consider one of these devices. But for the sake of your companions, learn how to turn off the button clicking. As least then, they can look at the gorgeous sunset with the illusion that civilization is miles away.

Ron 'Fallingwater' Moak