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Showerthought: a ranger at Mount Rainier drew my route in the dirt and it changed how I plan trips
Last August I stopped at the Sunrise visitor center and a ranger sketched my 3 day loop in the dirt with a stick instead of handing me a map. I followed his scratched out line down to a creek crossing he marked with an X and it saved me about 4 miles of pointless climbing. Has anyone else had a random trailside tip beat a whole guidebook route?
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the_vera4d ago
A dirt sketch from one ranger is just one person's memory of one trail on one day, and it can go bad real fast if a tree falls or a creek jumps its bank after a storm. Guidebooks get checked, updated, and cross read by lots of people, so they catch things a stick drawing never will. One lucky shortcut does not mean we should all start trusting random trailside scrawls over a real map.
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