Hiking Equipment Made in America, GPS Receivers and Solar Chargers

I spent last summer preparing for and then enjoying a rather unusual reporting assignment: a trip to the bottom of the Grand Canyon, on foot, followed by a black-tie dinner next to a remote waterfall. Insofar as the trip involved not getting lost in the middle of the desert and blogging frequently from what is arguably the remotest town in the lower 48, I feel qualified to offer gift-buying advice on GPS receivers and solar panels. (And, because I’m the sort of person who builds a database every time I do anything, I’ve also got some information on made-in-America hiking gear.)

Smartphones may be supplanting their in-car counterparts, but trail GPS receivers are still essential accessories for serious hikers: their batteries last longer than a smartphone’s; they’re not dependent on a cellular signal to work; and their ruggedized bodies make them much better able to withstand the punishment of a long trek.

The latest generation of outdoor GPS receivers comes in both touch-screen and buttoned varieties. I chose a model with buttons, Garmin‘s GPSmap 62stc ($600), for my trip because I figured it’d be easier to use with dirty hands and in blazing sunlight, and its smaller screen conserves batteries. The GPSmap’s form factor and interface have been refined over the course of more than a decade, and the current product is intuitive and fast, solidly built and unobtrusively sized. (See the track that it produced during my 8-hour hike out of the Grand Canyon last August on the excellent Garmin Connect Web site.)

If you’re used to the silky iPhone experience, the current generation of touchscreen GPS receivers will disappoint you. I tried both Magellan’s eXplorist 710 ($550) and Garmin’s Montana 650t ($700). Both have balky touchscreens that require a big, plodding fingerpress before they’ll respond.

The eXplorist is perhaps the better of the two for substantial hikes. It’s smaller, its basemap is more appealing and its user interface is somewhat more polished. Like the Montana, it has a built-in camera that takes geotagged photos. Unlike the Montana’s, the eXplorist’s camera can be activated by an external weather-sealed button rather than through a series of awkward menus.

The Montana seems oriented toward geocaching, a fun hobby that involves using a GPS receiver to find trinkets that other hobbyists hide in public parks. It’s got an enormous screen and a neat feature that can send tracks, routes or waypoints from one Montana to another wirelessly. And I’ll give it a few points for offering a choice of rechargeable battery or AAs.

If you intend to, say, blog over the course of your multi-day hike, you’ll need to either carry lots of batteries or take along a solar charger.

Most practical, portable solar panels don’t produce enough electricity to power your devices as you use them. Put aside notions of typing away on your solar-powered laptop all day while an army of trained monkeys attends to you. Most of these solar chargers amount to a rechargeable backup battery for phones or other small electronics that can be recharged by the sun in a pinch–and over a long period of time.

The largest panel I tried needed about 8 hours of direct sunlight to build up enough of a charge to power a small laptop for two hours. You’ll get similar ratios out of smaller panels that are oriented toward charging phones: you have to leave the panel in bright sunlight for a few hours to charge its own battery, then plug that battery into your phone.

GoalZero takes  a modular approach to solar chargers, with several different sizes of panels and battery packs that you can chain together as needed. I tried both a Sherpa 50 kit, which includes a four-panel folding solar array and a hardcover-book-sized battery pack; and a Guide 10 Plus kit, which comes with a smaller array and a battery pack made up of four AA rechargeable batteries. Both kits include some means of recharging their batteries from an outlet, and the Sherpa 50 can connect to an inverter that will power a standard AC outlet. Generating direct current from the sun, converting it to alternating current with an inverter and then converting it again (usually) to DC inside your electronics is inefficient; you won’t be able to power anything for very long with this sort of setup, but it’s a useful safeguard against total loss of power.