January 1, 2010

  • Caution When Using GPS Systems

    GPS systems are nice, and they will always manage to get you to where you want to go.  But sometimes all those options need to be attended to.  Case in point: a couple leaving Portland and trying to get home for Christmas let their GPS take them down a Forest Service Road and a few spur roads through the high desert of Eastern Oregon where they got stuck in snow for three days.  That's because they told the system to plot the shortest route for them.  It did just that.  But short is not always best or safe.

    Ironically, what saved the couple from Nevada was the one thing on their cell phone that they could not control.  Though the battery was nearly drained, the GPS location signal, found on all cell phones manufactured during the last several years, managed to report a weak location signal to the 911 service they finally managed to reach.  A Lake County deputy found them in the Winema-Fremont National Forest outside the small town of Silver Lake on Sunday afternoon and pulled their four-wheel-drive Toyota Sequoia out of 1 1/2 feet of snow with a winch. 

    Sometimes you need to change the option to have the system follow only the major highways.  A friend of mine found this out the hard way a few months ago and nearly ran out of gas taking a short route for a couple of hundred miles down a very lonely and deserted desert road.  Fortunately for him, he arrived at a small, one gas station town at 8pm, just as his onboard digital gas meter was indicating that he only had 1 gallon left.  He got lucky.  A few minutes more and he would have spent a cold night in his car.

    So let these two examples be a lesson to you.  You should always know the capabilities of your equipment and when to use them.   

    Another thing to remember when traveling outside your normal and known area (especially in winter conditions), is to carry some food, water, blanket, and extra warm clothes with you.  Our friends from Nevada did, and that may have saved their lives.

Comments (7)

  • i still drive the old fashioned way...no GPS...and i rarely get lost....

  • Whew!!  What an adventure!!:eek:

    I'm glad that those people got out alive!!

  • I don't have a GPS but if I did, I'd sure take your warnings to heart.  That is truly some scary stuff.

  • If you drive a truck, a 5-gallon gas can in the bed can also come in handy - and will hardly be noticed if you *don't* end up needing it.

  • I still prefer maps. GPS instructions have many built-in problems - including that discovered by the unfortunate OR couple.
    Actually the GPS is pretty handy - if you have a map

  • @tychecat - It wasn't the fault of the GPS.  The couple failed to use common sense.  They didn't know how to use their GPS.  They didn't stop to consider that bad weather would dictate being careful with their route.  And I would venture to say that they never zoomed the GPS map out to get a big pictures of where they would be heading off to.  All of which in a failure of common sense.

  • Susan, you are absolutely right - and this also demonstrates a problem with all but the largest-screened GPSs - unless you know maps, or stick to main roads, where you really don't need a GPS, they are sometimes misleading (!)

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