Log 2015050401

The weather band radio station for the The Wilderness Loop of the Buckeye Trail (Road Fork, Whipple and parts of the Belle Valley and Stockport Sections, North Country Trail partially concurrent) is WNG734 on 164.4 MHz (Ch. 1) from Marietta of Washington County and KZZ46 transmitting at 162.425 MHZ (Ch. 2) from Athens.

Log 2014090801

I'm at Days Inn in the City of Athens for a night. I still have yet to complete New Straitsville Section - Buckeye/ North Country/ American Discovery Trail, Pts. 19 - 27. The place where I intended to road side camp is a designated parking area in the Athens Unit of the Wayne National Forest, which may be construed as a "trailhead." Road side camping is prohibited within 150' of trailheads and I don't know of another suitable spot around there.

Anyways, I really needed a NiMH battery recharger. My previous unit was lost and I was getting low on charged AA's and AAA's. These batteries power the flashlights and hand GPS and I didn't want to risk loosing both on the next route. I lost my paper map on the previous route and the only thing that would back me up would be navigation by waypoints only on the smartphone.

The smartphone can eat batteries when navigating. The phone's aftermarket application wouldn't take my Buckeye Trail tracks (the line you follow). But it was good with the waypoints, which is a custom file that i wrote corresponding with the points in a Buckeye Trail map. Those points have a descriptive guide that without digital copies from the Buckeye Trail Association, would have taken a considerable amount of time to transcribe myself. And there was no promise that the text would have shown up on either app, or the hand GPS (since i haven't experimented with it yet, I felt that the project was too risky to undergo considering the fixed amount of time I was under to prepare other things.

The track on the hand GPS is based on the the BTA's GPS/ GIS Depository. They are somewhat beta and work as well as displayed on Google Earth. I've only been lost once and that was on an off-road portion where there was a 5-way intersection and for some reason, the trail wasn't blazed there and I had to guess. Well, I guessed wrong. But it didn't take long to know that I wasn't traveling the same course as the track and I promptly fixed that. These days, my hand GPS is my primary means of navigation, even with a map.