Navigating in the backcountry was no easy task! Many of our nodes were installed in remote regions with no cell service. Teams spent time each evening or in the early morning studying maps and using feedback from property owners to plan their route to each site. We used a variety of different tools to navigate in the backcountry. Teams used paper maps as well as navigation apps to find their way to the sites. Each group took an atlas or a paper map of Oregon or Washington into the field. In addition to this, volunteers imported the site coordinates for each day into several different navigation apps. Each platform had its own distinct advantages and teams often flipped between multiple apps and paper maps to navigate to their sites. It was not uncommon to find that different maps showed different roads or disagreed about the quality of the road. 

Atlases were great for planning general routes but sometimes they did not show smaller roads or roads located on privately owned land. Maps provided by the Forest Service and timber companies provided additional detail in some regions. Each team used different navigation apps depending on the type of phones they had as well as what they were already familiar with. Before going into the field and losing cell service, we downloaded the maps for the regions we would be in working in that day. Most teams used a combination of Google Maps, Maps.Me and GPS Tracks or GPX Viewer. Sites located near houses or businesses could usually be found using turn-by-turn directions. Sites located in more remote areas usually required using Maps.Me or looking at satellite imagery. Each team recorded their path to each site using GPS Tracks or GPX Viewer. Saved tracks proved useful in finding our way out of complex road systems and finding our way back to these sites nearly a month later to recover the instruments. Even with the help of saved routes from the deployment, during the recovery, we encountered some unexpected challenges such as road closures, overgrown roads, and downed trees.

The last instrument to be recovered was located in a particularly complicated road network shown on the maps above. My field partner and I used the GPS track from the team that deployed that node to navigate the complicated road system. We encountered some fallen trees along one of the roads the deployers had taken and turned to Maps.Me to find an alternate route to the site. Once we were at the site, we used the deployment notes and a compass to locate the buried node.

– Sarah Nolan