Adventure lover? Risk taker? or Wilderness seeker?
You can be whoever you wanna be but always find a way to keep safe in nature. Every path you take, every river you cross or every mountain you climb are part of something bigger and tougher as it may seem at first sight.
As an adventurous team, we have gone through all sort of experiences in nature together. We've laughed, we've cried, we've shouted out loud but, mostly, we have spent a good amount of time discussing if we should have faced North, South, East or West. When everybody knows about orientation in nature, a good talk can easily become a debate session. After some routes, we discovered the Garmin inReach Explorer+, a GPS that became our Swiss knife of a digital tool.
It’s our Global Positioning System, weather forecaster, satellite communicator, and emergency beacon.
- Dennis Fiore, Wild Dirt co-founder
While on our Olympic National Park trip we used the Explorer+ to check our position with the maps we downloaded before we left.
We loved being able to check the way points we set up before the hike that identified known water sources, campsites, and other features.
- Dennis Fiore, Wild Dirt co-founder
We always loved the quote “do one thing every day that scares you” which is misattributed to Eleanor Roosevelt. She actually said “You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face.” and what we love about a device like the Explorer+ is that you can strive to face fear. You should of course have knowledge and not just rely on an electronic device but it certainly helps.
The Explorer+ is more than just a GPS. Because it has satellite connection you can communicate globablly by sending SMS and/or email messages. We fired off daily status and positioning messages to family and friends. Since phone service was so spotty this gave a peace of mind to those back home. Lastly, we checked the weather forecast every few days to have a heads up to temperature fluctuations and precipitation that could be coming our way. Being out on the Olympic Peninsula the weather can change fast and we wanted to be prepared for whatever Mother Nature threw at us.
All in all, this tool allowed us to safely further and faster into the wilds.
- Dennis Fiore, Wild Dirt co-founder