Navigating the river

Submitted by defranmj on Sun, 09/23/2018 - 20:02
Forums: 
Trip Planning and General Discussion

Greetings!

Planning a short overnight trip from Thetford, VT to Hartland, VT in October.

What is your typical method of navigation on the river? Is cell-phone map coverage reasonable to rely on in that area or would I be better served with a handheld GPS? I want to make sure I know when I've reached my campsite, and when I've reached my end site the following day.

Thanks,

Michael

2018 Through Paddler

Fri, 09/28/2018 - 08:24

During our trip we had a Garmin GPS which was only used a few times. Trying to use to find distance to a campsite was annoying as it tried to find a path via road to the destination.
We both had Sprint phones and service was sporadic. In any case one of our goals was to get away from electronics so we primarily used the Paddler's map which we kept handy and we were able to keep pretty good track of our progress based on landmarks. You won't miss the I 89 bridge!
Enjoy your trip.

wbjohn

Mon, 03/18/2019 - 15:23

I used a Garmin vivoactive 3 smartwatch with GPS to find the campsite we used. It worked very well but I needed to use the gwmap app to set up the waypoints.