Mt. Whitney Portal Store & Hostel Forums General Mt. Whitney Portal Store Message Board SPOT II GPS Tracker & Messenger

A friend of mine turned me on to this site http://www.spotwalla.com/

You can set up the dates of hike (or other tracked activity) and it will grab the information from your shared page and automatically create and update a permanent page. And it will do this for multiple activities.

And of course the SPOT data can be exported as a .kml file so that the route can be saved on google earth.

But, I Imagine that if I start taking the backcountry stuff more seriously, I will have to go out and get myself a real GPS.

I did an export of our 2009 trip to KMZ and put that into Google maps: http://maps.google.com/maps?hl=en&tab=wl

turns out there was a 200 data point limit on that export and it turned a pretty detailed collection of track points into a rather crude representation of what we did. Not sure if that limitation still exists.

That's a pretty good limitation to know about.

There are people who call into 911 and complain about their order at McDonald's or that they can't get a ride to the liquor store to buy more booze (real and recent incidents). This doesn't make 911 a bad service.

Would all of the abuses that happen with the SPOT be worth it if it saved one life?

When people call 911 to complain about McDonalds, a paid Law Enforcement officer responds. When the "Yuppie 911" button is pressed, in Inyo County, a team of professional volunteers responds.

The surplus in abuse the SAR Teams have been subjected to due to theses false alarms has worn out volunteers. This may cause one life or more not to be rescued in a timely manner.

I admit I'm slightly jaded.
Wink

with as many people on the MMWT, I can't imagine ever pressing the button unless I was somehow flung hundreds of yards off of the main trail into a deep crevice with multiple broken bones and internal bleeding AND then only if my iPod battery ran out, my bag of peanut M&Ms was empty and my hangnail was being exceptionally pesky.

You said: "Remind Friends that help does not mean call the Sheriff's Office!"

The local law enforcment agency is legally responsible for your safety in the backcountry; not your friends. Local SAR teams and their supporting agencies have the expertise for conducting rescues. Your friends, although well-intentioned, probably don't have all the resources required to dig your butt out of trouble.

I'm aware that many (even here in Bishop) among the "elite" sneered at SAR personnel and their work...until those occasions when their friends couldn't do what was necessary and expedient to bail them out of trouble...or recover their bodies.

very interesting.....

Dustrunner Sez:
The local law enforcment agency is legally responsible for your safety in the backcountry; not your friends. Local SAR teams and their supporting agencies have the expertise for conducting rescues. Your friends, although well-intentioned, probably don't have all the resources required to dig your butt out of trouble.

I'm aware that many (even here in Bishop) among the "elite" sneered at SAR personnel and their work...until those occasions when their friends couldn't do what was necessary and expedient to bail them out of trouble...or recover their bodies.


In response to a post by wink that said:
"Remind Friends that help does not mean call the Sheriff's Office!"

And wink's profile says that he is the Inyo County SAR coordinator.

I'm not too terribly worried about needing any SAR services, but I certainly respect those whose job it is or even moreso if they volunteer. But I gotta say, I wouldn't know who to call now. Everything I have read on this site is that we aren't supposed to call 411 because it goes to the CHiPs and that we are supposed to call the Inyo Country Sheriff.

Good thing that I am no longer a daredevil.

Maybe SPOT should come out with a downgraded version of the tracker/messenger that only does the tracking and sends messages of peace, love and happiness and has the 911 buttons disabled. That way we could enjoy the features that we are looking for without being associated with the yuppie 911 abusers.

An OK message that was a bit off from the summit of Mt. Muir:




I had another track point showing me way down on the west side of Whitney when I was up on the crest.

It looks like the Spot should have a GPS lat/lon readout to tell you where you need to go for it to make you safe.

Dale B. Dalrymple
http://dbdimages.com

SPOT only keeps 50 tracks in the buffer and then deletes tracks on a FIFO basis. Love that Spotwalla logs all of the tracks for any given time period and plots them permanently.

Here is my Whitney summit on 9/7-8
http://spotwalla.com/tripViewer.php?id=1eb14c7e72bbf06a4

Actually, SPOT removes entries from your history and shared page based on age, not a limit of 50 entries. RichardP can confirm that my shared page recently had the complete history from a one-day climb of Mt. Gardiner and another climb of Whorl Mt. a few days later. There were nearly 150 entries in total. The Gardiner entries have since aged off.

Hey Bob,
you seem to have truth on your side. I was mistaking the fact that it was only displaying 50 tracks with the idea that they were being deleted. If you look at my current page, you'll see only 50 tracks displayed. But there are 129 entries and as you scroll through the pages the other tracks show up. I guess I have to play with it a little to get all of the entries to display.