Now that costs are coming down, will Personal Locator Beacons be the hot new accessory everyone’s got to have on everything they own?
In a bid to potentially become the new L.A. Lights, the Isaac Daniel Company is putting GPS tracking devices in just about everything, due to attack your store shelves sometime around Thanksgiving ‘08. The company has a history of tracking-device shoes for finding lost kids, as well as in medical and law-enforcement, and now they’re looking to broaden their horizons.
The shoe pictured above is their Hill model, aimed at hikers. They’re also rolling out a hunters’ boot and on-the-town shoe, although I honestly don’t know how useful that would be.
Their site’s shop is still under construction, but an article about a medical model from last year quotes sneakers at $335 a pair, with a $25 per month subscription fee — which is pretty outlandish, considering the SPOT tracker is only $169, with subscriptions of $99 a year ($150 with google maps tracking).
Then again, the SPOT probably won’t get you into a club.
Check out their web site for more info, and to see if anything else is available yet. And turn down your speakers. There’s a Good Morning America clip that starts blasting as soon as you open the page.
Reader Bruce was poking around a post I did on free Garmin-compatible map alternatives from a while back. In the post, I wrote that I hadn’t bought any MapSource maps for my GPS unit for three reasons: 1. You can’t transfer maps from a National Geographic Topo program onto the Garmin units and I HATE closed systems. 2. Hiker-friendly 24k resolution for Garmins was limited to National Parks and recreation areas, and 3. They’re expensive ways to get information that is essentially free to the public … given a reliable printer and some free time.
What can I say? I’m a New Englander. I hate spending money.
Bruce was similarly frustrated — and since the free options GPS Tracklog rounded up have made little progress in making more California based maps, it appears we’re up a certain scatalogically named creek without a paddle … or map.
Garmin has been working on solving one of those problems, and may have convinced me to drop 99 bucks on some maps — because they’ve finally started releasing regional 24k resolution map packs.
Right now, they have one pack for California and Nevada, and another for Washington and Oregon, available only on MicroSD cards. There are no announced planned release dates for further packs, but we can assume (and hope) they get here quickly.
Personally, I’m not one for puzzles of any sort. If the solution doesn’t become apparent to me within a few minutes of starting, I end up just getting frustrated and angry. Maybe puzzles are supposed to teach me a life-lesson about dealing with that, but so far they’ve been unsuccessful.
However, I do have a lot of “puzzle people” in my life, and a puzzle that tests your knowledge of geography is ok in my book. Or, at least, as good as a puzzle is going to get.
See how well you know the planet at National Geographic.
Via Contours.
Recently, Google released version 4.3 beta of their beloved Google Earth program.
It’s a minor update, but does add lots of shiny new bells and whistles — like day and night lighting effects, increased 3D views and buildings, and a new Street View layer to match up with the same view on Google Maps. Basically, lots of pretty eye-candy, and the ability to create theoretically possible clear-sky views of downtown L.A. and the San Gabriel Mountains.
The Google Earth Blog has done an excellent job of rounding up all the new features into one easy to view video demo. Be sure to stop by and check it out, then download the new Earth software by following this link:
A few days ago, Google quietly added some fancy new contour lines to its “Terrain Mode” on Google Maps.
As noted before, most of the prominent peaks are labeled, as well as other geographic features. In National Parks, campgrounds, ranger stations, and a few trails show up, too — but our local National Forests are still missing this information … although honestly, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time.
Now, when are we going to get to print these things out instead of having to buy topographical maps?
Via GOBlog, courtesy Team Geared Up.
The National Park Service has updated and upgraded the maps on individual parks’ web sites.
They’re basically high-res scans of those Park maps they hand out at Visitors’ Centers — so while they’re not really suitable for hiking, they are great at getting an overview of a specific area you’re planning on visiting … and will at least show you which trails are most likely to be crowded.
There’s a small green rectangular button beneath the banner image on each park, which will fire up the streaming, zoomable flash map. Previously, clicking on any map link on an NPS page would open up a PDF map, which would either display the same information or take down your entire computer with a browser crash.
So yeah, these flash maps are a marked improvement.
Via National Parks Traveler.
I’m proud to announce the grand return of the Modern Trail Map!
View Larger Map
This is a home-grown Google Map with hiking information in Los Angeles and Southern California. Every trail I’ve written up for the site is accompanied by a pin, color-coded by difficulty. Clicking on a pin will give you a thumbnail image and short description, and a link to the in-depth review.
This is a great way to get a visual idea of where these trails are in relation to you, and will hopefully be a helpful resource for planning your next hiking trip.
You can use the in-line map in this post, or get a larger version at the Modern Trail Map tab at the top of the page.
Enjoy!
A nasty strain of the flu wiped out half the floor in my office building this week, myself included, so I haven’t been up to date on the latest developments of our little hiking blogosphere.
Rick at BestHike dug up a site called Trailspotting, which has one of the best implementations of in-line Google Maps on a hiking site that I’ve seen.
Its “Just the facts, Ma’am” approach, clean design, an excellent organization make this a highly-recommended site for checking out trails in Northern California. I’ll be checking back on this one often.
After poking around Nikolas Schiller’s page from the last post, I stumbled upon an online collection of maps of Los Angeles from the turn of the century.
The Library of Congress Exhibition, called “Los Angeles Mapped,” documents the history of how people viewed L.A. — from its late 1600s existence as a theoretical island to its orchard & oil existence to the early freeways, it’s a fascinating little collection of images.
Even though they’re not exactly the easiest things to navigate around, they are still great to look at. Of particular interest is the full map of L.A. County’s rail system from 1912, when the SouthLand was covered in over 1000 miles of track.
I just got an email from someone asking how to get to some good long distance trails in L.A. without a car. Sadly, the easiest answer is “go back to 1912 and take the rail to Echo Mountain or Chantry Flats.”
But hey, in November we might be able to vote for an additional tax to fund that Subway to the Sea we’ve heard so much about …
I remember one of the first (of many) things that freaked me out about L.A. when I first moved here was the post apocalyptic wasteland of oil derricks you see when you’re driving north out of LAX on La Cienega. Coming from New England, I always assumed that sort of thing was reserved for the more rural, wide-open west — not urban, world-class-city Los Angeles.
It was the first of many of my assumptions about L.A. that turned out to be very, very wrong. The city, as it turns out, used to be mostly farmland, orchards, and oil fields — fairly recently in its history, too.
While searching for an unrelated map, fellow map nerd Nikolas Schiller came upon an old map of downtown and West L.A. from 1905, showing the locations of all the oil wells and derricks that used to dot the landscape. He used the map to create a Google Earth Overlay, which is pretty fascinating.
Click through to see if you’re sitting on an old filled-in well. Then worry.
Then be sure to check out the rest of Nikolas’ site. Especially if you like maps, fractals, computer art, and small doses of radical progressive political thought.
Via Curbed L.A.
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