I can use my phone / GPS thing in bad weather! The Hiking Geek post

I did a short (no doubt, by hardcore Hikers standards) 4 hours on a local walk / hike this morning – up the Wessenden Valley , onto the Pennine Way and then back down across part of Saddleworth Moor to Marsden.

I used the Viewranger GPS app , now installed on my phone – although I’m still figuring it out. I kept the phone dry despite the truly APPALLING rain that son Joe and I had put up with for most of the time. Summer? I don’t think so. The horizontal rain and strong winds made our faces hurt. Meh. The phone stayed dry because the really cool Aquapac arrived in time on saturday and its a great little bag. The camera lens was a bit obscured by part of the non-transparent case but I think that’s because I kept my chunky bodyglove / bumper case on the phone. If I took that off and kept just the phone inside the Aquapac then it would be a fine fit, I’m sure .
Witness this slightly blurred photo – although that could be down to the weather rather than the case obscuring part of the camera lens..

my Dog near the Pennine Way and Oldham Way cairn

As well as testing out the Aquapac, I was also working out how to use the neat service offered by socialhiking that can be used with Viewranger.
I like the fact that this site / app service was set up by a guy who loves what he does (hiking) and was initially meant for him to be able to share a charity walk he was doing with friends.

It’s a shame the map of the route only showed 3 beacons / locations of where we were; as it looks a bit odd. The idea was that Viewranger would send out a ‘beacon’ location of where I was (or rather, where my Aquapac-d phone was) every 15 minutes. So you would get a good / smooth plan of my progress (if I had chosen to share the map with anyone). But for some reason it didn’t. No problem, as this was just a little test / local walk. But if I do the national 3 peaks (say) I’d like to have my progress viewable with more granularity on a public map which is an option in socialhiking.

I did more than 11km, not that I was counting distance – this was just a nice walk out with the always agreeable and reliably geologically (and music, amongst others things) knowledgable company of Joe.

Anyway, here’s the map as it stands..

 

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