Time to go Hiking?

What time is it when you are on the trail? Does it matter? That seems like a kind of silly question in the backcountry, but on our last trip into the Ansel Adams Wilderness, M was disappointed to see that her watch had stopped dead.

Eh, who cares? Who needs a watch anyway?

And then we started to think about how we use our watches when we hike. And it turns out we do that more than you might think.

P has a watch with a built in altimeter, so he often checks that function was we hike. In fact, he leaves that function on the primary display of the watch during these trips, so the time function is just a small footnote at the bottom. Still, he uses it to get an idea of how we are doing on the trail. Navigation is more than just knowing where you are---it's also knowing how far you have to go, and how long it is taking you to get there.

That means knowing what time it is

There are, of course, other ways of telling the time in the backcountry. The sun moves about the breadth of a hand at arm's length each hour (so does the moon, for that matter) so it's fairly easy to estimate time within an hour or so. If you are worried about making camp before dark, you should be able to do that just by looking at the sun, without the need for a digital watch.

And if you are a musician, you can certainly sing a few songs and keep track of the time that way--Bach's Bourree in E minor is almost exactly two minutes long, as P well knows.